Philippine telcos burdened with more customers per cell site

MANILA, Philippines - Telecommunications providers in the Philippines are serving more customers per cell site compared with other operators in Asia despite challenges in securing permits for infrastructure.

Gil Genio, Globe’s chief information and technology officer said in a statement user-per-site density in the Philippines is 2,244, based on estimates of 21,000 total cell sites and 47.1 million internet users.

Other countries in the region have much lower user-per-site density numbers.

Vietnam, which has almost the same number of internet users in the Philippines at 47.3 million, has user-per-site density of 860 and 55,000 cell sites.

Malaysia’s user-per-site density is at 937, based on 22,000 cell sites and 20.6 million internet users.

Japan has user-per-site density of 522 with 220,000 cell sites and 115 million internet users, while China’s user-per-site density is at 566 with 1.18 million cell sites and 688 million internet users.

The Philippines showed the highest user-per-site density despite difficulties in securing permits from local government units, homeowners associations and other government agencies.

At present, Globe has a cell site backlog of around 3,000 sites because of challenges in the permitting environment.

Genio said at least 25 permits are needed to put up one cell site with the permitting process taking at least eight months to complete.

He said building additional sites is critical to improving internet services in the country to deliver more bandwidth to customers.

While there have been groups pushing for the open access model which involves sharing of physical infrastructure of multiple operators in the country, Genio said such could work only for mature economies with good infrastructure investments.

“The problem is congestion because of disproportionate number of cell sites versus traffic. Tower sharing will not alleviate congestion as current sites are in same locations. Tower co-location will not solve anything if we maintain same number of cell sites; rather, we need to build more sites,” Genio said.

For improved user-per-site density, he said the government needs to simplify the acquisition process for cell sites and rationalize the permitting process to support building telco infrastructure.

He said the National Telecommunications Commission should also monitor the use of frequencies.

“Spectrum allocation is a function of site density in order to serve customers effectively. Spectrum must not be left in the hands of private companies that do not use it to benefit consumers,” he said.

Genio said Globe also backs the development of a national broadband plan to promote greater internet access and improve delivery of government services in the country.