Poe wants to see more effort from DITO telecom that will benefit unserved areas

Senator Grace Poe on Wednesday dared DITO Telecommunity to prove its goodwill and provide unserved and underserved areas of the country.

'By strategically fulfilling its commitment to meet the said number of barangays mostly in the NCR area where it’s the easiest way to go about it, Dito is literally giving us the bare minimum of what it committed to do,” Poe said in a statement.

The senator chairs the Senate Public Services Committee, which deferred the approval of franchise renewal of the telecommunications company until it fulfills its commitments to the government.

Poe said that after succeeding with its franchise bid, DITO had submitted a form that includes a list of 7,425 barangays it has committed to serve in its first year of application.

But at the Senate hearing last Monday, December 7, she questioned DITO for rolling out its services mainly in the Metro Manila, instead of barangays in unserved and underserved areas.

"DITO will actually do a test run and said they were able to cover thousands of barangays, so we would actually want to go to one of those barangays and see if there’s been a marked improvement in their connection,” Poe said.

"We can always see the numbers, but unless you’re actually the end user and experience how it performs, you can’t really vouch for it," she pointed out.

DITO currently operates thru a 25-year legislative franchise granted to Mindanao Islamic Telephone Company (Mislatel) in 1998, which was transferred in 2019 to the consortium of Davao businessman Dennis Uy's Udenna Corporation and Chelsea Logistics Corp., and state-owned China Telecommunications.

Poe had said that the Senate will have enough time to tackle the telco's application for a franchise renewal before it expires in 2023.

DITO was given until January, 2021 to deliver its first-year commitment to cover at least 37 percent of the country's population and provide a minimum internet speed of 27 Megabits per second (mbps).

"We are very excited for a third telco to come in, but we are here to safeguard the commitments it made to the government for the benefit of our people,” Poe said.