As modern technologies rapidly evolve, the Philippines' telecommunication companies have been optimizing their fiber and broadband network capacities this year to reach more Filipinos.
With a capital expenditures (CAPEX) guideline of P71.5 billion, Globe Telecom Inc. recorded a total investment of P54 billion in the first nine months of 2023, with over 90 percent spent on data enhancements and infrastructure.
It boosted its 5G network coverage with more than 700 new sites, covering 97 percent of outdoor coverage in the National Capital Region (NCR) and 92 percent in Visayas and Mindanao. Around 5.2 million 5G devices have been connected to Globe for September this year. Globally, the firm has expanded its 5G partnerships to 156 carriers in 82 destinations.
According to analytics firm Ookla, Globe has logged improved broadband speeds in 19 locations in the third quarter of the year.
From January to September 2023, the firm has built 833 new cell sites and upgraded 5,395 mobile sites to LTE in an effort to enhance its digital infrastructure.
Through the ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) Philippines joint venture of Globe Group with the Ayala Corporation and STT GDC Singapore, the firm broke ground in May for the STT Fairview, which is projected to be the largest interconnected and carrier-neutral data center in the country with a 124-MW capacity. It is expected to be completed by early 2025.
The firm has tapped the First Balfour - Leighton Asia joint venture to construct the data center.
Construction has also begun for the 4,500 square meter STT Cavite 2 data center campus with a 6-MW capacity. The capacity of its existing data centers have also been upgraded to 5.2-MW.
In total, STT GDC Philippines has seven facilities in NCR, Cavite, and Davao for this year, with more planned in the future as Globe aims to fulfill its goal of making the country a data center hub in the Southeast Asian region.
Meanwhile, PLDT and Smart Communications Inc. has also been on track in its efforts to accelerate technology to utilize within its operations.
Notably, PLDT's information and communications technology (ICT) subsidiary ePLDT launched "Pilipinas Cloud," the country's first sovereign cloud, last October in partnership with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT). Using cloud-computing solutions, the Pilipinas Cloud will store sensitive government data and applications in a "trusted cloud network," to centralize government processes and operations.
PLDT and Smart also tapped the generative artificial intelligence (AI) capacities of Google Cloud’s Telecom Subscriber Insights. Smart hopes to facilitate more responsive virtual agents and chat box interactions with subscribers through Google’s first-party foundation models for summarizing text and keeping conversations, hosted by the Vertex AI platform.
Just recently, PLDT has successfully tested 50G Passive Optical Network (PON) technology, which the firm uses for its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service. The test allowed the telco to provide efficient fiber technology since 50G PON offers 50 gigabits per second (Gbps) speeds which is up to 20 times faster than other variations of PON.
For the first nine months, PLDT and Smart's CAPEX amounted to P55.73 billion, majority of which has gone into network and IT-related operations.
PLDT's fiber subscribers was logged at 3.14 million as of September. PLDT has extended its fiber footprint to more than 1.1 million cable kilometers. It covers nearly 70 percent of the country's municipalities or towns or 17.3 million households. Fiber ports have also increased to 6.15 million covering 18,000 barangays nationwide.
Smart's 3G, 4G/LTE, and 5G mobile network also covers 97 percent of the country's population, through its 73,800 base stations nationwide. To date, it has expanded its 5G data roaming services in 87 destinations with 159 international telco partners worldwide.
Converge is also catching up with the legacy telcos, as it surpassed its two million residential customer base, and gross additional subscribers reaching more than 225,000 in the third quarter, attributed to its FiberX, Surf2Sawa, and BIDA Fiber brands.
As of September, Converge has 7.9 million fiber ports, covering 16.7 million homes or 77.85 percent of the population.
The telco has also provided free wifi at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) terminals last November, particularly at Terminals 3 and 4.
Through its parent company ComClark Network and Technology Corp., Converge has also provided equipment for the DICT's Universal Internet Subscription for GIDA (UISG) Project last November, which aims to provide network connections to more than 2,000 geographically isolated and disadvantaged areas (GIDA) in the Philippines.