PLDT completes P67-B network upgrade

MANILA, Philippines - Dominant carrier Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) has completed its P67-billion network upgrade and modernization program way ahead of schedule, tripling the company’s voice and data capacity.

PLDT president and chief executive officer Napoleon Nazareno said in a statement that the completion of the massive two-year capital expenditure program ahead of schedule would significantly enhance service quality and reliability.

“The group’s investments have produced a network that is unrivalled in terms of coverage, capacity, and resiliency,” Nazareno stressed.

The upgrade brought the PLDT Group’s total fiber assets to 54,000 kilometers that is more than four times the 12,000 kilometers of fiber network being built by Ayala-controlled Globe Telecom Inc.

This gives PLDT the most extensive and advanced network in the country with over 48,000 kilometers of fiber assets with an additional 6,000 kilometers of Fiber-to-the-Home further expanding its long-term evolution (LTE) sites.

“We are close to covering the whole of Metro Manila with the more reliable and faster fiber connection and gaining momentum in servicing the rest of the country,” Nazareno said.

He explained that Smart Communications and Sun Cellular have established an access network that is enabled with 3G and LTE technologies with 3G coverage reaching majority of the population and LTE piloting in a growing number of areas.

These developments come on the heels of a core network upgrade that would boost PLDT’s domestic fiber optic network (DFON) with 100G Technology and the completion of an international undersea cable system that more than doubled the international bandwidth capacity of the PLDT group.

“No other provider comes close to the network that we have now, not just in terms of capacity but more importantly, in terms of resiliency and efficiency. We are now in the best position to meet the demands of the future. We are extremely prepared for data explosion,” he added.

Recent studies suggest that mobile data traffic alone would grow by 10-fold in the next four years. For the PLDT Group alone, mobile Internet revenues nearly doubled with 97 percent growth in the first half of the year compared to the year-ago level.