Free Wi-Fi coming to the Philippines won't be perfect, but the service will likely result in people holding off from subscribing to mobile data plans for a bit.

The Philippines government announced that it will spend about 1.5 billion Philippine pesos (US$32 million) a year to provide free Wi-Fi to the nation. The service will cover half the nation by the end of this year, and will stretch over the country by end-2016, a government officer told Bloomberg.

This is expected to be relatively well-received by Filipinos, the majority of whom aren't subscribed to mobile data yet.

«Compared with developed markets, mobile data in the Philippines is still not seen as a basic need,» said Jerome Dominguez, an IDC analyst based in the Philippines.

«The free Wi-Fi initiative may cause some consumers to hold off on signing up for mobile data packages,» he told Mashable, adding that the majority of users in the country go online via a combination of free Wi-Fi or data packages from carriers.

According to Nielsen data, 57% of the population in 2014 was online, and smartphones consisted of 35% of mobile phones.

But smartphone adoption isn't directly correlated to mobile plan subscriptions, because the largely postpaid market is able to go online by tapping Wi-Fi hotspots.

Dominguez further pointed out that the speed cap of 256 Kbps for the coming free Wi-Fi service will put the brakes on a host of content types, particularly video streaming, which is becoming popular across various platforms.