How Many Internet and Phone Users In The Philippines

I attended a Frost & Sullivan Telecom conference at the Hotel Intercon. These conferences are normally expensive, but I got a free invitation. I guess the organizers must have met their sponsorship quota already and just wanted to fill up the space. :)

There were several interesting stats revealed during the various presentations. In 2008, the Philippines had 7.4M fixed line users and 68.1M mobile users. Internet penetration has reached 15%, or about 20M users. Of these, the PLDT group accounted for 1.2M -- that's for Broadband DSL + SmartBro. Globe had 379,000.

Even though mobile penetration is high, 3G usage is very low at 4%. Traditional 2.5G accounts for 12%, and good ol' 2G still has the lion share at 84%. Philippines is still predominantly a prepaid country with 97% using this mode of subscription.