Globe sees better rating from NTC

MANILA, Philippines - Globe Telecom Inc., a joint venture between diversified conglomerate Ayala Corp. and Singapore Telecom, hopes to get a better rating from the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) for the third quarter of the year with its ongoing $700-million network modernization program.

Cris Crisostomo, head of Network Quality Service of Globe, said during the “Balitaan sa Aloha Hotel” that the telecom provider is confident that it would get a better rating from the NTC as its modernization program is already 50 percent completed.

Crisostomo said the company hopes that at least 75 percent of its modernization program would be completed this year including the heavily congested central business districts in Makati and Ortigas.

According to him, the modernization program would be completed as scheduled on March 1.

Globe and Smart Communications Inc. of the PLDT Group failed to pass the standard for Grade of Service of four percent set by the NTC.

The second quarter Quality of Service Benchmarking Conducted on Mobile Network Service Providers of NTC showed that Globe had a score of 4.45 percent while Smart scored 9.95 percent.

The Grade of Service or blocked calls refer to the percentage of calls that were not given access by the network.

The monitoring teams simultaneously initiated a total of 1,506 on-net calls per network for Globe and Smart in 16 cities and one municipality in the National Capital Region (NCR).

Both companies were within the two percent minimum standard for dropped call rates with Smart registering a 1.53 percent call rate compared to Globe’s 1.66 percent. Dropped calls refer to the percentage of ongoing calls that were involuntarily terminated by a subscriber.

The PLDT unit had an edge in terms of average received signal level with -62.63 dBM compared to Globe’s -69.83dBM and both were well within the minimum acceptable average receive signal is -85 dBm set by NTC.

However, Crisostomo said the ongoing modernization would not guarantee a passing grade as the program would be completed by the first quarter of next year.

He explained that the network modernization program that was announced November of last year was only started last March 28 but is already 50 percent complete.

The Ayala-controlled company is building a new network that is future-proof resulting in higher quality call, pervasive 3G and 4G coverage, and faster mobile Internet experience.

In fact, Globe spokesperson Yolly Crisanto said the company was five percentage points better than the Grade of Service received by Smart despite the fact that the PLDT Group already announced in June that it already completed its P67 billion modernization program.

NTC commissioner Gamaliel Cordoba warned the other day that the regulator would impose sanctions and penalties including a moratorium on new subscribers against Globe and Smart if they fail to improve the quality of their services.

 “Actually, after we finish the September benchmarking, which is the third quarter, maybe we can impose that they can’t get additional subscribers because additional subscribers congest the network that they have. That is what we can do,” Cordoba said.

As of end-June, Globe had a subscriber base of 31.7 million. Smart has a 26.9 million subscribers under its mainstream Smart brands, while value brand Talk ‘N Text ended has 24 million subscribers. On the other hand, Digital Telecommunications of the Philippines (Digitel) had 15.9 million Sun Cellular subscribers while Smart subsidiary CURE’s Red Mobile brand had 600,000 subscribers.