In his State of the Nation Address today, one of the points President Duterte addressed is the need to improve telecommunication services. “Kindly improve the services before December. I want to call Jesus Christ to Bethlehem. Better have that line cleared,” Duterte said. “You give us half-cooked transactions, lousy service tapos ang tao ang nagbabayad. Tell us now if you cannot really improve on it because I will work by December.”

In his speech, Duterte called out companies like Smart for allegedly offering poor services. Smart, for their part, has been making efforts in improving their services. Aside from providing smartphones for RapidPass checkpoints, Smart and PLDT have been working hard in upgrading their infrastructure to improve overall 4G availability and overall download speeds.

PLDT has deferred to comment on the issue as of this writing.