PLDT Inc. pushed back the commercial roll-out of fifth-generation (5G) services to early next year as the country’s largest telco is still selecting the vendors for 5G equipment network.
“I don’t think it will happen this year, but certainly sometime next year, early next year,” PLDT chairman and president Manuel Pangilinan said in a news briefing.
PLDT earlier announced that it was targeting to launch 5G services for home broadband and enterprises by the fourth quarter of 2019.
Rival Globe Telecom Inc. last month launched the country’s first commercial 5G fixed wireless broadband services, beating PLDT and other telecommunication companies in Southeast Asia.
“I think we need to determine the standards by which 5G will operate and of course we have to choose a vendor or vendors. I think we are testing with Huawei, we are testing Ericsson, Nokia and maybe one more,” Pangilinan said.
“So over the next few months we will determine which vendors we’ll choose for 5G,” he said.
Pangilinan said PLDT planned to look at the cases in China, South Korea and the United States where certain elements of the 5G networks had been built or were being built.
PLDT, meanwhile, announced the Smart 5G Alliance which is composed of Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Microsoft, Nokia, Palo Alto, SMS Global Technologies, Araneta Center, the Ateneo de Manila University and the Clark Development Corp.
Through such partnership, PLDT Enterprise aims to further fast-track 5G adoption across verticals, and in turn, throughout the nation.
“Our strategy of developing use cases across verticals aims to leverage on the capabilities of 5G”•such as enhanced mobile broadband speeds, ultra-low latency and network intelligence”•to further boost the capacity of local industries,” PLDT first vice president and head of enterprise core business solutions Jojo Gendrano said.
PLDT-Smart has powered up 5G sites across Luzon, specifically at Clark Freeport Zone, Makati central business district, Ateneo de Manila University campus and Araneta Center in Cubao.
