NTC: Model for wasting taxpayer money

In his April 13 column (“The next generation”), Peter Wallace wrote about the very sorry state of telecommunications in this country. Compared with Vietnam now bustling with 70,000 cell sites servicing about 125 million cell phones, our country can only rely on 16,500 cell sites to service more than 130 million cell phones.

With such vital infrastructure so sparse and so pathetic, it is no mystery we have remained among the worst Third World peoples in Asia. Just think about it: Signals from telecommunications companies in this country are so weak and extremely selective in their reach. Everyone in my family has to get out of the house to experience the usefulness of cell phones. We are surely not alone in our miseries.

Our National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), supposedly in charge of keeping things within its sphere of influence copacetic, has turned out to be one of the most inept and useless agencies whose only relevance lies in being another model for sheer wastage of taxpayer money. Its failure all these years to invoke sanctions against the companies poorly serving the people’s telecommunications needs and to compel them to “shape up or ship out” is a perfect reason to abolish it already.

YVETTE SAN LUIS-PETROCELLI, [email protected]