Globe, Smart to sustain gains via better service

MANILA, Philippines - Rivals Ayala-controlled Globe Telecom Inc. and Smart Communications Inc. vowed to sustain the gains made with the completion of their respective network modernization programs resulting in passing grades from the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC).

Globe Telecom head of corporate communications Yoly Crisanto said in a statement that the company’s service to subscribers would further improve with the completion of the first phase of its $700-million network modernization and transformation program.

“Our network modernization is progressively moving forward, in fact, we are practically done with the first phase where all hardware has been replaced with brand new equipment,” Crisanto said.

When the quarterly benchmark results were done by the NTC beginning second quarter of 2012, she pointed out that the performance of Globe network has progressively improved which shows the gains of modernization.

 â€œThis is exactly why we are modernizing, to provide subscribers the superior network performance and service quality they deserve,” Crisanto added.

In the first quarter Quality of Service Benchmarking test conducted by the NTC, the grade of service of Smart improved to 0.87 percent in the first quarter from one percent in December while that of Globe deteriorated to 2.6 percent from two percent.

Blocked calls or grade of service refers to the percentage of calls that were not given access by the network or percentage of the network failure to establish connection between the caller and the receiver.

Both Smart and Globe also passed the rating for dropped calls that refer to the number of on-going calls that were involuntarily terminated. The NTC allows only two dropped calls for every 100 calls.

In the dropped call rate, Smart scored one percent the same level as last quarter’s while Globe had 1.53 percent from 1.2 percent.

At this time of the modernization program, Crisanto said Globe is adding capacity and fine tuning the modernized network to optimize its performance.

She reasoned out that changes in the results in the first quarter could be attributed to the time when the company conducted the tests or when it was calibrating its transmission capabilities.

“We are however, very confident that the network performance will continuously show improvement especially from this point onwards,” she said.

For his part, Smart spokesperson Ramon Isberto said the results showed consistent improvement in the company’s overall network service quality.

Isberto said Smart maintains clear superiority in providing quality of service with a 5-0 score in favor of the company.