Do You Know How Many Businesses Exist in Roxas City? Almost Nobody Knows.

The Book That Used to Sit by the Rotary Phone

For those of us who grew up before smartphones, and for Gen Z readers who did not, there used to be a thick, heavy book delivered by PLDT to homes and offices once a year. It was called the Yellow Pages.

It listed, in alphabetical order and by category, businesses operating in your city: hardware stores, funeral parlors, dental clinics, auto repair shops, restaurants, tailors. If you needed a plumber at 10 PM or an aircon technician before the summer heat got unbearable, you picked up the book, found the right section, and called.

Roxas City locals remember it. It wasn't fancy, but it worked. Sometimes it was even used to kill the cockroach.

That book retired. And while we have smartphones and fast internet connections, we never actually built the digital version of it. A complete, organized, open-web map of our local economy.

Two Government Offices. One Very Surprising Number.

Over the past six months, I have been attending a lot of meetings. Rotary club weekly meetings. Chamber of Commerce sessions. DTI Capiz events. Sangguniang Panglungsod public consultation hearings. As an ISP and as a member of both the Roxas City and Capiz Provincial ICT Councils, I have had a front-row seat to a city that genuinely wants to make the jump to be a digital city.

In those rooms, I heard a number that stopped me cold.

Both the BPLO (the Business Permits and Licensing Office) at City Hall and DTI Capiz independently placed their data at the same range: over 4,000 registered businesses in Roxas City.

I asked around after that. Friends in business, content creators, colleagues in the chamber. Most guessed somewhere around 500 to 1,000. A few confident ones pushed to 1,500.

Nobody said 4,000.

And yet, two separate government offices, working from different data sets, landed on a similar answer independently. The number is real. The city is bigger than we think.

Tribal Knowledge in a Would-Be Digital City

That gap, 4,000 actual businesses versus a public perception of roughly 1,000, is not a small rounding error. It is the story of an economy that exists fully on the ground but barely exists anywhere else.

The data lives inside City Hall spreadsheets and DTI registration databases. It surfaces in permit renewal seasons and occasional official reports. It is not a secret exactly. Nobody is hiding it. But it is not out in the open either, where Google, AI, tourists, investors, or a curious Capisnon student can simply look up.

This is what I mean when I say data desert.

The digital divide is not just about whether your household has a fiber connection. It is about whether the world can see what your city has. Right now, when an investor from Manila searches for seafood suppliers in Roxas City, the search engine either returns an empty result, an outdated Facebook post from three years ago, or worse: a hallucinated answer generated by an AI that has no verified local data to work from.

Four thousand businesses! Invisible to the open web.

Building Back the Map

For years, Wesfardell Connect has done one thing well: connecting Capisnon homes and offices to the internet. That is still the core of what we do. But fiber cables alone do not make a city digitally visible. They connect you to the internet. They do not put you on it.

About 85% of Roxas City businesses with any online presence at all exist exclusively on Facebook: a page, a group, or a chat thread. Facebook is fine for talking to people who already know you. But it is a walled garden. Search engines cannot index private group posts. AI tools cannot read your feed. And the moment a potential customer outside your immediate circle types your product into Google, you simply do not appear.

After months of consultations, civic conversations, iteration, and honest debate about what would actually work and what would just add friction, here is what we are building:

A free, public, open-web business directory for Roxas City and Capiz Province.

No logins. No paywalls. No Ads. No registration required to browse. Any local business that is registered with BPLO or DTI can be listed. Visitors from Barangay Lawaan or from a search engine in Tokyo can search by name or category and find what Roxas City and Capiz actually has to offer.

It is not a social media profile. It is not a closed database inside City Hall. It is a proper, crawlable, publicly accessible directory: exactly the kind of infrastructure that lets Google and AI search engines say, with confidence and accuracy, what Roxas City and Capiz have for the world.

A modern Yellow Pages. Free for every registered Capisnon business. Built on the open web, where it belongs.

This Cannot Be Done Alone

Wesfardell Connect is an ISP. We can build and maintain the technical infrastructure. What we cannot do alone is fill it with verified, accurate data and give it the public legitimacy it needs to be trusted.

For this to work, we need the city. We need BPLO and DTI Capiz to help us ensure business listings are accurate, current, and properly categorized. We need socio-civic organizations, Rotary, PCCI Capiz, JCI, and the rest, to help spread the word to their members and validate the directory as a credible community resource.

This is an open invitation. If your organization believes that Roxas City and Capiz deserve to be seen by the rest of the world, we want to build this with you.

The Number Deserves to Be Known

Four thousand registered businesses is not a small city. It is a city with a real, active, diverse local economy: one that produces, trades, services, and feeds its own people and visitors every single day.

The only problem is that the rest of the world does not know it yet.

We are working to change that.

future now.