said by chrisretusn :

Hey there banzaiUK, my wife is from Laguna (Biñan).

Phone lines here are in a nut shell of very poor quality and believe it or not contain wire splices at frequent intervals. Not to mention non-water tight connection/switch boxes some even missing covers. At least that describes the conditions here in my neck of the woods. They are upgrading and replacing older cable runs unfortunately for me, not in my barangay.

said by chrisretusn :

A lot of Philippine traffic goes through Taiwan. Back in Dec of 2006 a quake in Taiwan damaged nine undersea cables between Taiwan and Luzon. This parallelized Internet traffic in the Philippines. It was days before we got service back.