Internet in Iloilo City: Converge, PLDT and Globe Prices (2026)

A postpaid fibre plan in Iloilo City runs PHP 888–₱2,699/month (Aug 2026) across the tiers most renters buy, and not one peso of that is an Iloilo number. Converge and PLDT publish a single price sheet each, with no region, province or city attached anywhere on it. An Iloilo address pays what a Cebu address pays.

What is local is the opposite half. The three national carriers publish a price and no coverage. The one operator that publishes an Iloilo City district coverage list publishes no internet price at all. And in January 2025 the city cut PLDT’s cables off Calle Real and took its own City Hall offline in the middle of business-permit season.

The Price Is Not an Iloilo Number

Both providers whose pages load publish flat national figures. We read them on 20 August 2026.

Two details in that table are worth pausing on, because both are the provider disagreeing with itself rather than with us.

PLDT sells two 1 Gbps plans, at PHP 2,699 and PHP 9,499, with the same speed and the same landline inclusions in its own comparison table and no stated difference between them. The apply link behind the PHP 9,499 column ends 74991msf, where its four siblings match their own prices. We publish PHP 9,499 because that is the figure on the page, and note that PLDT’s funnel disagrees with PLDT’s table.

The Converge entry price is also not one number. Super FiberX Play at PHP 1,349 is the plan the rest of this cluster quotes, but Converge separately sells BIDA 888 at up to 75 Mbps for PHP 888, which is the cheapest postpaid fibre either company publishes. If you have seen BIDA 888 described as a 35 Mbps plan, that figure is stale: convergeict.com/bidafiber gave 75 Mbps when we read it on 20 August 2026.

The Globe PHP 1,499 in Circulation Is a Prepaid Load

PHP 1,499 for Globe GFiber circulates as a postpaid monthly plan. Globe does publish that number, twice, and neither instance is a postpaid monthly plan.

The pattern is legible. Globe publishes PHP 1,499 at up to 300 Mbps on the one Globe surface that loads, and the postpaid figure in circulation carries the same price and the same speed. The comparison page that states it names “official plan pages” as its source and links none of them, and the Globe pages it names return HTTP 403.

That block is not Globe being evasive about one page. On 20 August 2026 every Globe postpaid path we tried refused an automated request: the broadband landing page, the GFiber page, the plans page, the apex domain, the shop subdomain, the store locator and the newsroom. The block extends to robots.txt and sitemap.xml, which are the two files a website publishes specifically so machines can read it. A Cloudflare challenge is not a claim that a price does not exist, and a person in a browser will probably see one. It does mean no Globe postpaid price on this page could be sourced, so none is quoted.

What Globe does publish, on its prepaid site, is worth having:

The Only Contract Term Anyone Publishes

PLDT states it plainly in its own FAQ, and it is the longest of the three by a distance: “The Fiber Unli plans have a contract period of 36 months.” The installation charge is on the same clock. “There is no upfront cash-out required when you apply for a Fiber Unli Plan. However, a PHP 100 monthly installation fee for your internet service will be charged for 36 months as part of your monthly bill.” That is ₱3,600 across the term, waived if the application is eligible for what PLDT calls the Fiber Sale Promo. It publishes no eligibility rule for that waiver, and the promo pages it links would not load for us.

Converge’s terms are published too, and not where you would look. Its marketing pages carry no contract terms, its terms-of-use page covers website use only, and convergeict.com/faqs and convergeict.com/terms-and-conditions both return 404. But the plan record its own order system serves reads, verbatim: “24-month lock in period applies, Quick installation upon approval, Waived installation Fee worth PHP 2,500”. So the lock-in is 24 months, the installation fee is ₱2,500, and the waiver applies to all four Super FiberX tiers. Note which tiers carry that sentence, though: Play and Max do, and Prime and Ultra carry a television bundle line instead. Converge’s two most expensive fibre plans state no lock-in length in the plan record or in the contract.

Converge’s own published agreement carries the same 24 months, and carries it oddly. The plain internet Terms and Conditions provide that the service “shall be effective for twenty-four (24) four months therefrom (the ‘lock-in period’)”, reproduced here exactly: the words “twenty-four (24) four months” are a drafting error in the live document. The bundled cable television agreement on the same page carries the clean form. The period is defined, in other words, and the definition is the one sentence in the contract with a typo in it.

The exit cost is published as a formula rather than a figure: “Subscriber shall pay a pre-termination fee in the amount of the full Monthly Service Fee multiplied by the number of the months remaining in the lock-in period”. Leave a PHP 1,599 plan at month six of twenty-four and that is eighteen months, or PHP 28,782. Read the rest of the sentence before you rely on that, though. It continues “or in such amount as may be prescribed by Converge from time to time in its sole but reasonable discretion upon prior written notice to all subscribers”, which makes the formula a default rather than a ceiling. PLDT writes the same charge the other way round, as a cap: its Home Plan Subscription Contract sets the disconnection fee within the minimum term at “MSF X 3 of current plan”, so three months of the plan fee however many months are left. Converge publishes no ceiling, so ask for yours in writing.

Two clauses in that agreement are worth reading before you sign. The late-payment penalty is a blank: “Converge shall charge late payment penalty equivalent to _____% per month for all accounts not paid by the Due Date”, underscores and all, in the live document. And relocation is priced against a map you cannot see: “If relocation is not within service coverage, the Subscriber’s subscription, if still within the lock-in period, is deemed pre-terminated”. You can owe a full pre-termination fee for moving to an address the company will not tell you in advance whether it serves.

The one product that escapes all of this is prepaid, and Converge says so in its own words: Surf2Sawa is "mura, unli, at walang kontrata", cheap, unlimited, and no contract. It runs PHP 50 for a day at up to 50 Mbps, PHP 700 for 30 days, and PHP 180 to PHP 550 on the faster EXTRABOOST tier. Globe’s prepaid equivalent has no lock-in either, though it deactivates if you go three months without loading.

No Rule Asks an ISP Where the Fibre Reaches

The reason none of the three publishes a coverage map is not commercial secrecy. It is that no instrument requires one, and the regulator’s own rule sets a floor well above your street.

NTC Memorandum Circular 07-08-2015, the Rules on the Measurement of Fixed Broadband/Internet Access Service, is the governing instrument. Section B.2 reads: “Internet Service Providers (ISPs) shall specify the average downstream and upstream data rates per area. The area can be administrative regions (e.g. NCR, Region I, and so on) or provinces, or cities/municipalities.”

Three things follow. The finest unit the rule contemplates is the city, so nothing below Iloilo City is ever required. The operator picks which of the three to use, so publishing a Western Visayas average discharges the duty entirely. And the obligation is about advertised speed, not about whether a given address can be connected, which is the question a renter actually has.

The state has built the promise of better. NTC operates a National Broadband Map, advertising interactive coverage across all regions and a cell site database. It serves a client-rendered shell behind a development-tier authentication instance, its headline counters read zero cell sites mapped and zero speed tests recorded, and every sub-route returns 403.

The Operator That Publishes Coverage Publishes No Price

One operator does publish an Iloilo City coverage list, and it is not Converge, PLDT or Globe. Cable Star Inc. names six of the city’s seven districts on its own site, omits Lapuz, and attaches no internet price to any of them.

Cable Star Inc. is a local Iloilo City cable and internet operator with an office on Dra. Rizalina V. Bernardo Avenue in San Rafael, Mandurriao. It is not a reseller: when the city ordered aerial plant taken down from Calle Real, Cable Star was one of three companies that asked for an extension, alongside PLDT and Globe. And on its own site it publishes the thing none of the national carriers will, verbatim: “We offer services in the following areas: Iloilo City Proper / Jaro / Lapaz / Mandurriao / Molo / Arevalo. Neighboring Towns: Villa / Oton / Leganes / Sta. Barbara.”

That is six of Iloilo City’s seven districts. Lapuz, the port district, is not on the list.

What Cable Star does not publish is a price for internet. Its plans page advertises 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps tiers with no monthly figure attached to either, prices the cable television package at PHP 620 a month, and quotes PHP 292 a month for equipment on a 24-month term. One of its speed tiles renders as “14399 Mbps”, which tells you how carefully that page is maintained.

Neither half is assembled from the other. A price with no map cannot tell you whether the line reaches your street, and Cable Star’s map comes with a television tariff rather than an internet one.

The City Has Already Cut the Cables Once

The Iloilo-specific risk here is not the tariff. It is the physical plant, and the city has been actively removing it.

The Sangguniang Panlungsod passed a regulation ordinance on 18 January 2023 requiring electric utilities and telecommunications carriers to move all wires and cables underground across the plaza complexes, Sun Burst Park, B.S. Aquino Avenue, Mandurriao district and every protected heritage property in the city. Carriers had 240 days after the ordinance’s full implementation to remove aerial wires and poles, a fine of PHP 5,000 after three notices, and permit cancellation on the fourth. The deadline was extended, at the request of PLDT, Globe and Cable Star, to the end of December 2024.

Then the city enforced it. As the Iloilo Metropolitan Times reported on 5 January 2025, “Starting Jan. 2, the City Engineer’s Office dismantled non-compliant lines and poles, including those of major firm PLDT”, the company “which provides connectivity to Iloilo City Hall”. City Hall lost its internet during business-permit renewal season, delaying the processing of “15,000 to 18,000 business permits”, with the works running along JM Basa Street in the heart of Calle Real. Mayor Jerry Treñas: “This unacceptable situation cannot be tolerated. PLDT has been given ample time to comply with the ordinance.”

Two things a renter should take from that. Calle Real and the plaza complexes were live worksites for cable relocation as recently as January 2025, and we found nothing published since that declares the work finished, so a lease in the historic core carries a connectivity question a lease in Mandurriao does not. And the city government’s own building, on the city government’s own street, lost its line to a scheduled compliance action. No source we opened states how long it stayed down, so we do not put a number on it.

What the city publishes to soften it is public Wi-Fi. The city government’s free Wi-Fi programme page lists 25 named free Wi-Fi locations: 12 schools, 7 plazas and 6 government offices, the plazas covering six districts plus the Esplanade. The programme launched on 9 October 2025 with 23 sites across 46 access points; it had grown to 25 when we read it on 20 August 2026, and the page carries no date. This is hotspot siting. It tells you where to work when your line is down and nothing about whether your unit can be connected.

One absence is worth stating, because a reader arriving from a storm page will assume the opposite. There is no dated internet or fibre outage reporting for Iloilo City at all. Across SunStar Iloilo, the Daily Guardian, Panay News, the Iloilo Metropolitan Times and the Manila Times, for the August 2026 flood and for Typhoon Tino, every retrievable outage story here is about electricity. The one documented connectivity failure was the city’s own cable removal.

For a paid fallback, Regus lists one Iloilo City location, at Festive Walk Mall in Iloilo Business Park, with day coworking from PHP 1,090 a day and membership from PHP 2,690 a month, on a page captured 3 January 2026. Those are “from” prices on a city landing page, not a rate confirmed for that centre.

The permit layer is the last piece, and it is priced nowhere. The Office of the Building Official publishes a named Telco Permit under Presidential Decree 1096 with a three-working-day processing time and no fee: the city’s 398-page Citizen’s Charter defers building-official fees to “Annex A. for schedule of fees” more than forty times, and Annex A for that office is not in the document. The City Engineer’s Office gives its excavation permit fees only as a reference to Tax Ordinance 2007-016, which the city does not publish either. Note which utility gets a named path: there is a Metro Pacific Iloilo Water excavation permit and no telco equivalent.

The Check That Replaces the Map

There is no map, so the procedure is the answer. In order, and before you sign anything:

1. Run all three serviceability checkers against the exact unit address, not the building and not the barangay. Converge and Globe both gate coverage behind an address form; that form is the only coverage answer that exists.
2. Ask the building admin which providers are already terminated in the building, and how many units are on each. An existing riser is the difference between a three-day activation and a permit.
3. Ask what the building charges for a new provider to enter. Nobody publishes this, in Iloilo or in Cebu, and it is a real cost.
4. Get the early-termination fee in writing before signing, since no provider publishes it.
5. Do not take an installation date on trust. No provider publishes an installation lead time for either city. Figures circulate, including elsewhere in this cluster, and none of them traces to a provider commitment. Treat a promised date as an estimate and do not schedule a work start around it.

What a Year Actually Costs

The prepaid row is the one most people underrate. At PHP 700 a month for 30 days of up to 50 Mbps, Converge’s prepaid tier costs less than any postpaid plan, carries no contract, and is the only route that does not commit you to an address for two or three years, depending on the carrier. For a first lease in a city you are still testing, that is usually the right answer.

The gigabit rows are there for completeness. Iloilo City has no published speed measurement of its own, and the national fixed-broadband median is 113.98 Mbps at 6 ms latency as of June 2026, so a 1 Gbps plan is buying headroom rather than a measured local outcome.

If you want the rest of the monthly picture, the Iloilo cost-of-living breakdown puts internet beside rent, electricity and water, and the electricity rate series is the one Iloilo utility figure we track as a dated ledger rather than a snapshot. Nothing equivalent exists for ISP pricing, here or anywhere on this site, which is why every figure on this page carries the date we read it instead of a series.