I do not have Internet access where I am living now. In the capital towns of the Philippine Municipalities it is available from the mobile phone system. But coverage only extends 5 km from town. My house is 14 km from the municipality of Malapatan, and from Glan. I live smack between the two. I have a house in General Santos City, 45 km from here. I usually go to the house there to get on line.
I suspect that most Americans take phone communications for granted. I grew up there, and by the time of WW2 we always had a telephone in the house. But mobile phones were not yet even talked about. When I began work overseas in 1962, I was plunged into the non-connected world, and quickly became used to it. We relied on local international mail for personal communications. Business was done over the Embassy circuits, which now seem primitive compared to what the world has.
When I first moved to the Philippines in 1988, Manila had a telephone system, but coverage in the provinces varied widely. In General Santos City, the local phone system had just 4 digits, which means there were a maximum of 9,999 users. Local calls were OK, but it was impossible to call Manila, far in the north. Incoming calls were usually possible, but outgoing long distance which could not be directly dialled, required operator assistance - and the operators most of the time didn't want to bother.
When mobile phone made their debut in the late 1990's, everyone wanted one. They were expensive, clumsy things. My first mobile, a Motorola, was heavy, in a canvas covered bag the size of a Kleenex box, with a strap to carry it over the shoulder. By 1998, the phone had thankfully shrunk to a small palm-sized unit with a flip-top. Very cool. That is what I used in north Vietnam on my road project. I had to search for a “hot spot” to get connected, but was a big improvement over nothing - which is what most local folks had.
By the 2002 I'd worked my way north up to the China border, and the phones had become very small,and easy to use. There were still coverage problems in most of the places I worked, though.
The state of the art is moving faster than I can keep up with. I may be old fashioned - these cute phones that are in tablet form seem like toys to me, and I will stick with my plain vanilla Nokia handset with the standard telephone keyboard.