Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT), the country’s dominant provider by subscribers and revenue, has reportedly completed a major two-year PHP67 billion (USD1.6 billion) network modernisation plan ahead of schedule. The ambitious project is expected to significantly enhance service quality through a more than tripling of voice and data capacity, it said. Commenting on the development, PLDT president and CEO Napoleon L Nazareno said: The group’s investments have produced a network that is unrivalled in terms of coverage, capacity, and resiliency … What was already the most extensive and advanced network in the country has been further super-charged with our access network providing the widest coverage via the expansion of LTE [Long Term Evolution ] sites and a transport network that rides on over 48,000km of fibre assets with an additional 6,000km of fibre-to-the-home [FTTH] rolled out.’ In total, the PLDT group now has over 54,000km of fibre in its network, roughly four times the 12,000km of fibre-optic networks being built by its rivals.
In addition to fibre, the group’s mobile divisions, Smart Communications and Sun Cellular, have begun rolling out 4G LTE technologies, while 3G coverage now reaches the ‘majority of the population’, with LTE being piloted in a growing number of areas.