Globe sees completion of Visayas leg of $700M project

MANILA, Philippines - Globe Telecom Inc., a joint venture between diversified conglomerate Ayala Corp. and Singapore Telecom, is set to complete the Visayas leg of its $700 million network modernization and transformation project.

Globe head of Visayas network Technical Group and Network Operations Mike Sandil said that the results of the company’s new Visayas network are “very encouraging.”

“We are pleased to note that here in the Visayas, we continue to raise industry standards as mandated by the National Telecommunications Commission,” Sandil stressed.

Based on the company’s internal benchmarking tests, he explained that the call setup improvement of Globe was at 99.40 percent higher than the NTC’s criterion of 96 percent.

He added that the company’s dropped call rate was also now at 1.01 percent or way lower than the NTC norm of two percent.

With the island and province of Cebu taking the lead at 100 percent equipment modernization, the heart of the Philippine archipelago is steadily nearing completion and at the final phase of transformation.

Along with Cebu, the neighboring provinces are also well on their way to having a brandnew network.

After the modernization in Metro Cebu has been completed, mobile service quality including short messaging system (SMS) end-to-end delivery success percentages and delivery time and call-setup time all posted marked improvements.

This was measured when mobile traffic increased in the Cebu Globe network by 15 percent between the pre- and post-benchmarking period between the third week of January 2012 and the second week of September.

According to Sandil, the island of Leyte is already set for modernization followed by Samar and Bohol towards the yearend then Iloilo and Roxas provinces at the onset of 2013.

Globe president and chief executive officer Ernest Cu experienced the improvement in service in Cebu a few weeks after its modernization was completed:

“On some sites, I was able to reach surfing speeds of 6.8 Mbps, which is a very high number,” Cu said.

Cu pointed out that Globe has completed about 60 percent of its nationwide network modernization and transformation program.

The program covers the relocation of sites, repositioning of antennas new antenna system, laying down 12,000 kilometers of fiber optic cable as well as increasing the number of cell sites covering both 3G and 4G.

Both Globe and PLDT’s Smart Communications Inc. failed to meet the regulatory standards for service quality of the NTC in the second quarter of the year.

Globe and Smart did not pass the standard for Grade of Service of four percent set by the NTC as seen in the second quarter Quality of Service Benchmarking Conducted on Mobile Network Service Providers released by the agency yesterday.

The monitoring showed that Smart scored 9.95 percent while Globe had 4.45 percent. The monitoring teams simultaneously initiated a total of 1,506 on-net calls per network for Globe and Smart.