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The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said about 30 percent of the population are still not connected to the internet.

In a Palace briefing on Wednesday, Information and Communications Technology Secretary Ivan John Uy admitted that with limited resources and budget allotted to them it will "take a while" to connect all the far flung areas in the country to the internet.

"We have about 30 percent of our population that is not connected and considering our more than 7,000 islands. It’s gonna take a while, resources, both financial and human resources limitations," he said.

"Our budget this year was slightly reduced. Maybe our hands are a little bit limited in being able to deploy to more islands and more mountainous communities," he added.

However, Uy also expresses his gratitude to the Congress which is planning to increase their budget.

"But I'm thankful that based on the information we had from Congress, it seems that they can still increase the budget. So, if they will be able to increase our budget we will be able to connect a larger area to our ‘Broadband ng Masa’ project," he said.

Uy said the installation of internet connection to far-flung areas is expected to become easy once the satellite dish is activated in the country next year.

"We cannot do 100 percent because there are certain islands that are let’s say only a handful of people..., we’re identifying communities like that, a few thousand people do not have connectivity," he said.

"By next year, once the Starlink operation is activated in the Philippines it will be easier instead of setting up a building (or) tower, we just have to bring the satellite dishes there. The Starlink satellite dish can be placed inside a backpack," said Uy.

"We can install a solar panel with that and they will be up and running ? it’s a plug-and-play ? you just have to connect it to the power source, it will automatically search for the best signal up in the sky and you have Wi-Fi," he added. Robina Asido/DMS