Community Cellular Networks in the Philippines: Challenges and Opportunities towards Sustainability

Community networks (CNs) are alternative approaches to provide communication access in unserved and underserved areas, where market forces fail to deliver service due to the high risk of investment and minimal returns. This situation resonates in the Philippines with just under 70 % mobile phone penetration. To address this, our team deployed community cellular networks (CCNs) to provide basic 2G voice and SMS services, alongside a novel partnership and operational model. In this paper, we document our experiences and challenges encountered as we test this model in the real world. After almost two years of operations, we reflect on our learnings, which will be applied towards improving our own model and potentially contribute to the development of other approaches in delivering sustainable last-mile communication access.