PLDT Group said Thursday it will build at least two new cable landing stations in the country to serve the increasing need of customers for data.
PLDT chairman and chief executive Manuel Pangilinan said as an integrated network, PLDT and Smart were investing in international connectivity “like nobody else can.”
These include submarine cables, also made of fiber, which connect its network to the rest of the world. PLDT and Smart are part of a network of 16 international cable systems.
“We are investing in more,” Pangilinan said.
“We already have three cable landing stations and at least two more are coming up next year. I think that’s something a single fixed broadband operator cannot do. In particular, when they have to grow outside of the big main post, it becomes very costly to lay all the fiber in the country. We can do that because we are using fiber not only for fiber-to-the-home but also for mobile and for enterprise customers,” Panglinan said.
PLDT earlier joined an international consortium to build the Asia Direct Cable—a high performance submarine cable connecting the Philippines to other Asian countries, allowing it to support bandwidth-intensive applications such as 5G, cloud services, internet- of-things and artificial intelligence.
As an integrated telco service, PLDT and Smart offer more products to the market. “PLDT and Smart offers include mobile internet as well as your fixed wireless and fiber-to-the-home,” said Smart president and chief executive Alfredo Panlilio, who is also the PLDT chief revenue officer.
PLDT’s vast network, the most extensive and advanced digital transport network in the country at 395,000 kilometers as of end-September, supports all internet delivery platforms such as fiber fixed broadband, mobile data services via 4G and increasingly 5G and carrier-grade WiFi.
Ongoing expansion works will extend PLDT’s fiber footprint by another 81,000 km, including 31,000 km in 2020 and 50,000 in 2021.
The company’s backbone network capacity as of end-September was at 55 terabits per second. With its ongoing works, PLDT is looking to increase this capacity by another 37 terabits per second to serve customers’ continuously growing demand for data and deliver technologies like 5G, LTE and FTTH.
Pangilinan said that “5G without fiber will not work, and therefore we have a high synergy between the various networks. In the last couple of years, we have deployed the strategy called ‘follow the fiber.’ Wherever there is fiber, we can connect any business, fiber-to-the-home, fiber-to-the-enterprise and fiber-to-the-base-station.”
PLDT and Smart passed 8.3 million homes and intend to deliver more improved services and ensure a future-proof, reliable and resilient network by focusing on expanding and upgrading their entire network ecosystem which consists of 9,892 cell sites, 56,799 base stations, 3.81 million ports for outside plant facilities and 25 core data centers.
