Globe Telecom Inc. asked the government to address permit and right-of-way issues that hamper infrastructure development in the telecommunication industry.
Globe general counsel Froilan Castelo said the prohibitive permitting environment, site acquisition and RoW issues kept telecommunication operators, including Globe, from aggressively rolling out broadband infrastructure to boost Internet speed in the country.
“A lot of the infrastructure backlogs in the telecommunications industry could be attributed to challenges in getting LGU permits. This is why Globe has been calling on the government to provide policy support for initiatives to improve Internet infrastructure in the country,” he said.
Castelo said telecommunication companies were required to secure at least 25 permits, a few of which were also mentioned in the broadband policy paper and which caused delay in the deployment of Internet infrastructure such as cell sites and fiber builds.
He said securing different permits at the LGU level could become very challenging, from the sheer number of permits to the different political personalities that mobile operators had to deal with. Globe alone has more than 500 cell sites waiting to be built at any given time, he said.
“What we need is to increase cell site density by building more cell sites,” Castelo said.
Based on the study made by TowerXchange in February 2016, the number of unique physical cell sites in the Philippines was one of the lowest in Asia with a combined 15,000 cell sites.
China had the highest number with 1.18 million cell sites, followed by India with 450,000, Indonesia with 76,477 cell sites while Vietnam had 55,000, Thailand with 52,483, Pakistan with 28,000, Bangladesh with 27,000 and Malaysia with 22,000 sites.
Meanwhile, mobile broadband services in the Philippines improved in the fourth of 2015, as operators stepped up investments in data networks, according to the latest Asia Network Quality Report of J.P. Morgan Securities.
J.P. Morgan Securities said the advances were most felt in carriers’ 3G mobile data service, as the Philippines’ average 3G download speed increased from 1.77 megabits per second in the third quarter to 2.09 Mbps in the fourth quarter of 2015.
It said the Philippines posted higher 3G download rates by end-2015 than Thailand (1.46 Mbps), Japan (1.56 Mbps) and Hong Kong (2.05 Mbps). The JP Morgan report cited crowd-sourced data gathered by wireless coverage research firm OpenSignal.
Among Philippine carriers, PLDT wireless subsidiary Smart Communications set the pace in this period, raising its average 3G download speed from 1.66 Mbps in the third quarter to 2.54 Mbps in the fourth. “The report highlights the strategy we’ve embraced in our network investments. We’ve paid specific attention to enhancing our 3G capacity and resiliency because about 90 percent of our subscribers who go online use 3G handsets. Improving our 3G data service delivers immediate benefits to the largest number of people in our subscriber base,” said PLDT and Smart’s consumer group head Ariel Fermin.
“At the same time, we are also building for the future. So we continue to roll out our 4G/LTE network because we expect more and more people to start using 4G/LTE handsets,” Fermin said.