A Law Built to Break a Franchise Chokehold
For decades, entering the Philippine telecommunications market meant securing a legislative franchise — a process requiring an act of Congress that could take years and effectively let incumbents lobby competing franchise bills to death. Republic Act No. 12234, the Konektadong Pinoy Act, lapsed into law without President Marcos's signature on August 24, 2025, and took effect September 14, 2025, specifically to remove that chokehold. It reclassifies every segment of data transmission — international gateways, backbone, middle mile, last mile — as inherently competitive, letting providers operate under National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) administrative registration rather than a congressional franchise. It also compels incumbents to open "passive infrastructure" (poles, ducts, towers, dark fiber) to new entrants on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms, backed by mandatory published Reference Access Offers and an Access List maintained jointly by the DICT, NTC, and Philippine Competition Commission.
The law deserves the credit reform advocates are giving it. PLDT and Globe Telecom, the incumbent duopoly, initially opposed the bill on national-security and constitutionality grounds — arguments that, whatever their sincerity, also happened to protect a franchise system that had kept new entrants out for a generation. Both companies have since shifted to backing implementation of the law's Implementing Rules and Regulations, a tacit admission that open access is now the operating reality.
The First Mover Chose Manila, Not Mindanao
Bitstar Telecom — backed by MRC Allied and running on PT&T's network — is the clearest early proof the law works as designed. Rather than building a parallel national network from scratch, Bitstar plugs into PT&T's existing infrastructure while handling its own sales, onboarding, and support, launching shared business broadband up to 1 Gbps and dedicated lines from 50 Mbps to 1 Gbps (Inquirer). That is precisely the network-sharing model Konektadong Pinoy was written to enable, and MRC Allied's roughly ₱1 billion commitment to PT&T preferred shares shows real capital is following the new rules.
But Bitstar's first market is enterprise customers in Metro Manila — the most commercially attractive, already best-connected part of the country. That is a rational choice for a new entrant chasing revenue quickly. It is also exactly the outcome skeptics of open-access reform predicted: shared infrastructure lowers the cost of entry fastest where the underlying network is already densest, which is rarely where connectivity is scarcest.
What the Coverage Numbers Actually Show
"Access and internet speed fall sharply in rural regions, leaving many communities disconnected," the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) concluded in its review of the country's broadband gap.
The numbers PIDS and the World Bank have compiled make the shape of the problem concrete:
- Only 28% of Philippine households had fixed broadband access as of 2023 — far behind Vietnam (79%), Thailand (55%), and Malaysia (54%) (World Bank).
- Internet penetration among the wealthiest households rose from 43% to 60% between 2019 and 2022; among the poorest quintile it rose from just 2% to 5% over the same period — a gap that widened even as the national average improved.
- The NTC estimates roughly 30% of rural communities still lack reliable internet access (PIDS).
- Telecom towers nationwide grew from 17,850 in 2020 to 35,043 in 2023 — a near-doubling that predates Konektadong Pinoy and shows physical buildout was already underway through other channels.
None of this means the law failed; it hasn't had time to. But it does mean the law's stated purpose splits into two distinct problems. RA 12234 explicitly directs the DICT to identify and prioritize passive-infrastructure deployment "in remote, unserved, and underserved areas." That mandate is a separate policy lever from the open-access provisions that just produced Bitstar. Competition among providers for existing demand, and infrastructure investment where there is no existing demand yet, are different problems — and the law bundles solutions to both without a clear mechanism forcing the second to move at the same pace as the first.
Competition Is Necessary, Not Sufficient
The steelman case for treating them as one problem is real: PIDS itself calls the entry of a third telco and satellite-service liberalization "promising steps," on the theory that a more competitive, lower-margin market pushes every operator — incumbent and entrant alike — to chase incremental subscribers in previously uneconomical areas once easy urban share is taken. That is a legitimate mechanism, and it's the same logic that has driven Converge ICT and DITO's expansion into secondary cities over the past several years.
The risk is treating Bitstar's launch as proof the job is done. It proves the franchise barrier is gone, which is real progress — Congress no longer gets to slow-walk a competitor into non-existence through a stalled franchise bill. It does not, on its own, prove the deployment mandate for geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas will be enforced with the same urgency. The Access List and Reference Access Offer requirements are new administrative machinery that DICT and NTC now have to actually run, not provisions that execute themselves.
What Would Prove the Skeptics Wrong
The test to watch is not how many entrants register, but whether the Access List DICT is required to maintain names underserved areas within a defined timeline, and whether NTC publishes coverage data by region — not just national averages — so gaps like BARMM's roughly 10 Mbps average mobile speed can be tracked against Metro Manila's numbers over the next two years. A law that ends a decades-old franchise monopoly on market entry is worth defending on its own terms; that reform is real and Bitstar is the proof. Whether it also closes the rural gap is a separate claim, and one this launch does not yet settle either way.