PLDT continues network expansion

MANILA, Philippines - Dominant carrier Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) is looking at expanding the coverage of its international and domestic networks after completing a P1-billion expansion program to handle a much larger volume of data, voice, and video traffic for enterprise customers.

PLDT president Napoleon Nazareno said in a press briefing that the company would continue to invest heavily to expand its network in preparation for the growing number of traffic.

Nazareno said the recently completed data network service expansion program is part of its capital expenditure program this year amounting to P29 billion or about 19 percent of the company’s total revenues.

He said PLDT spent about P67 billion for its network transformation program for 2011 and 2012 representing about 23 percent of total revenues.

“Our enterprise customers can now rely on end-to-end managed services that are even more robust, reliable, and resilient than before,” he stressed.

The PLDT chief executive said the group is projecting robust demand for its mobile broadband services that continue to grow about 50 percent on the back of the continued decline in the price of smartphones.

Nazareno said PLDT sees the penetration rate of smartphones in the country increasing to as much as 30 percent over the next three to five years from the current growth of nine percent to 10 percent.

“This is a very positive development for PLDT,” he said.

For his part, PLDT executive vice president Eric Alberto said the company worked with global technology leader Cisco and international network systems specialist Ciena to upgrade its core network making it more robust, resilient, highly secured, and future-proof.

“This ensures our core system can support new generation enterprise services that are largely driven by a combination of video, social networking, and advanced collaborative applications,” Alberto explained.

According to him, the system enhancement would not only benefit new customers and at the same time improve the experience of existing customers connected to the 54,000-kilometer domestic fiber optic network (DFON) of PLDT.

He said PLDT serves major clients including banks as well as the business process outsourcing (BPO) industries.

For one, Alberto said the country’s BPO industry expects its revenues growing by an average of 15 percent to $25 billion by 2016.

For his part, PLDT first vice president Jovy Hernandez said the company’s fiber optic network is connected with three major submarine cables linking the Philippines to other territories including the US and Hong Kong.

 â€œThis translates to near-real time restoration of any potential cable system faults for our customers in the Philippines transacting with their counterparts in the US or Hong Kong due to the self-healing quality of the International network,” he said.

Hernandez said the PLDT Group would continue to expand to other territories as about 90 percent of the traffic from the Philippines goes to the US while others are directed at Hong Kong.

He added that several companies in the US are currently taking a second look at the Philippines with the direct communication link through the submarine cable systems.

On top of companies operating in the US, Alberto explained that PLDT is also targeting about 3.5 million Filipinos living or working in the US.

PLDT is part of the $400- million Asia Submarine-Cable Express (ASE) optical fiber cable system landing in Daet, Camarines Sur; the $500 million Asia-America Gateway (AAG) cable system landing in La Union; and the $500 million Asia Pacific Cable Network (APCN) cable network landing in Batangas.

PLDT head of technology Rolando Pena said the group has a total of 12 landing stations all over the Philippines including the three landing stations of the international submarine cable networks.