Piltel pins hope on new pre-paid digital service

Pilipino Telephone Corp. (Piltel) is banking on the growing popularity of its newly launched prepaid digital cellular phone service to help the company recover.

Piltel president Napoleon Nazareno said that in April alone, Talk 'N Text prepaid phone kits have registered sales of 60,000, making the firm confident of getting at least 400,000 subscribers by yearend.

"If the trend continues, we might be able to see an earlier turnaround than what is projected, but definitely not within two years because of our debt restructuring program," he said.

Nazareno said that in the past, their revenues were low due to Piltel's inability to compete with cellular phone operators using the global system for mobile communications (GSM) which allows the delivery of short message service (SMS) and Internet access, among other things.

GSM users accounted for 47 percent of the country's total cellular subscriber base as of end 1999, with more than 1.2 million customers. The 1998 figure was only 17 percent.

According to Nazareno, the firm's inability to offer text messaging and the lack of affordable, attractive handsets limited its ability to establish itself against the heavily promoted GSM offerings.

As a result, Piltel's subscriber base for its code division multiple access (CDMA) digital network remained at 21,000 while analog billed customers even decreased from 180,000 in 1998 to 114,000 in 1999 although prepaid users jumped from 177,000 to 323,000 for the same period.

Despite the poor performance of CDMA, he said they have no plans of scrapping it or migrating their subscribers to analog or GSM.

Nazareno said there are services which can be developed for CDMA which are being studied but he refused to provide any details.