According to an Ookla study, the Philippines has failed to meet some minimum requirements for higher AI tasks, particularly augmented reality (AR), exposing gaps in its digital push. The country posted a median upload of 11.97 Mbps on 5G networks, below the basic requirement of 20 Mbps for AR technology. The Philippines ranked 14th in 22 markets worldwide on bandwidth allocation for upload, with telcos assigning barely nine percent of 5G throughput for upload. The country also placed 14th on multiserver latency, with a response time of at least 40.2 milliseconds from AI models. This latency works best only for simple AI functions like large language models (LLM) but stumbles with voice AI and AR solutions. In Southeast Asia, latency is better in Singapore (24.6 ms), Malaysia (33 ms), Thailand (37.7 ms), and Indonesia (38.4 ms), all meeting the industry standard for voice AI of less than 40 ms. The Philippines also recorded the worst latencies when linking to cloud platforms Amazon Web Service (104 ms), Azure (106 ms), Google Cloud (88 ms), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (133 ms).