PLDT spends $44.8 M to offer high-speed wireless broadband

MANILA, April 24 (Xinhua) — Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), the country's biggest telecommunication firm, said Thursday it has spent 2 billion pesos (44.82 million U.S. dollars) to deploy a technology that enables high-speed wireless broadband services.

PLDT said in a statement that it has rolled out the country's first Time-Division Duplex-Long Term Evolution (TD-LTE). TD-LTE is one of the two wireless data transmission technologies that fall under the international standard of LTE, the other being Frequency- Division Duplex (LTE-FDD) which is used by mobile networks.

"We are using LTE-FDD for our mobile networks and TD-LTE for fixed wireless broadband services running on separate frequency bands," said PLDT Technology Group Head Rolando Pena.

PLDT said this will "transform" Philippine consumers' Internet experience as this would give them ready access to multimedia services.

"With maximum speeds per individual user of up to 42 Mbps, the ultra-fast TD-LTE is almost six times faster than WiMax and 21 times speedier than Canopy, and can serve more customers than both, " said Pena.

The company said it has built TD-LTE sites from Cagayan province in northern Philippines to Davao del Sur in southern Philippines to complement efforts to broadband the entire country via fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) and Next Generation Network (NGN) services.

PLDT said it will build more TD-LTE sites this year to reach the most remote areas of the country.

Previous reports have shown that the Philippines lags behind its Asian neighbors in terms of Internet speed.

For instance, ASEAN DNA said Internet speed in the Philippines averages 3.6 megabytes per second (Mbps), slower than the four Mbps offered in Laos, 4.1 Mbps in Indonesia, 4.9 Mbps in Myanmar and Brunei, 5.5 Mbps in Malaysia and 5.7 Mbps in Cambodia.

Internet broadband testing firm Ookla also said the country's Internet speed is considerably slower when compared to South Korea 's 52.95 Mbps, Japan's 41.18 Mbps, and China's 19.04 Mbps. 

This prompted a Philippine senator to seek an investigation into the Internet service provided by local telecommunication firms.