Overpriced Wi-Fi subscriptions hit DICT

PHOTO: Department of Information and Communications Technology official Facebook page

MANILA, Philippines—Another case of overpricing involving the government’s free public Wi-Fi program was uncovered at a Senate hearing.

DICT Secretary Henry Aguda himself admitted this when Sen. Loren Legarda brought up during Wednesday’s hearing of the Senate subcommittee on finance the P150 million proposal that the agency sent to her office.

READ: Legarda pushes for Wifi access in GIDA sites, IP towns

According to Legarda, her office received an unsigned proposal from the DICT when she inquired about the cost of renewing the monthly subscription for the free Wi-Fi project in her home province in Antique.

“There’s a detailed cost breakdown, but I was surprised why it’s so expensive,” Legarda said in Filipino.

“They said I supposedly need to purchase or include another P150 million under the GAA  (General Appropriations Act) provision for the site. I said, Why is that? It should just be a monthly subscription. Unless I’m ignorant about engineering, and you really have to buy new digital infrastructure every year,” she added.

Based on the DICT proposal to her for 2025,  Legarda said the subscription cost breakdown for Antique would be P90,116 per month.

A review of the DICT, however, showed that the monthly subscription would only cost P26,000 per site.

“So with our new computation, we’ll only be paying about P26,000 per site per month for the subscription service,” DITC Undersecretary Christina Faye Condez-De Sagon later told the committee.

“The resulting new rate of P26,000 per site is actually the result of what we’ve been doing in the department right now. We’re rationalizing all the contracts; we’re reviewing all the contracts in the department. So this is actually why there’s a drastic drop in the monthly subscription fees that we’re going to be paying moving forward,” she further explained.

Although the new amount was “more reasonable,” Legarda noted that the original P90,000 monthly subscription proposal was four times higher.

“Not double, not triple—it was quadruple overpriced, four times more expensive,” she said in Filipino.

Before this, Legarda noted that the new P150 million request was on top of the P71 million and another P150 million previously allotted for the same project.

But according to Aguda, the proposal was not authorized, as it was not in line with the department orders he issued.

“One, that is overpriced,” he said, “Masyadong mahal yun (That’s way too expensive).”

Those who submitted the unsigned proposal to Legarda’s office are already being investigated by the DICT— one has been put on immediate preventive suspension, while the other one is no longer connected with the agency, Aguda said.

“I think we can put it on record that the regional director is attesting that this document came from the central office that was sent to you,”  the DICT chief said when Legarda pressed for an explanation about the unsigned document.

It was not the first time that overpricing allegations hit the DICT’s free internet project.

In 2021, former DICT Undersecretary Eliseo Rio claimed that the agency’s procurement of managed internet service for the free Wi-Fi access in public places, amounting to P466 million, was overpriced.

READ: Rio bares overprice in DICT’s P466M free internet deals

“There were four awardees, all of them, cost per site per year is approximately five times more than the UNDP,” Rio said then, referring to the DICT’s partnership with the United Nations Development Program for the free Wi-Fi program. /mcm