By Emmie V. Abadilla
Compared with other countries in the region, the mobile Internet price per gigabyte (GB) of Globe Telecom, Inc.’s prepaid service is one of the lowest in Southeast Asia and selected Asia Pacific countries, including China and India, the local telco yesterday maintained.
The mobile Internet price per GB of Globe is $0.43, or P22.50, way below Singapore’s $3.20 (P168.42), Thailand’s $1.84 (P96.84) or even China’s average rate of $1.31 (P68.95) per GB.
Globe prepaid mobile Internet price/GB is also lower compared to Malaysia ($0.53 or P28.07) and Indonesia ($1.33 or P70.00). Overall, the Philippines is second only to India which has $0.23 or P12.04. At present, India offers the cheapest rate in the region.
In the first half of 2019, Globe saw its mobile data traffic almost double, with a 96% increase to 764 petabytes this year from 390 petabytes in the same period of 2018.
Globe’s data plans and promos, and the general public’s rising clamor for data-intensive activities such as online gaming, streaming, and on-demand video content sustained the increase in data usage.
“With our customers’ surging demand for mobile data consumption, providing more economical data promos is more important than ever. We will continue to ramp up our network rollout, build more cell towers, and create more cost-effective promos to give our customers the best possible quality of experience,” announced Globe President and CEO Ernest L. Cu.