The country’s third major telecommunications player DITO Telecommunity Corp. of Udenna Corp. and China Telecom said it is ready to roll out services by the second half of 2020.
DITO said it was “fully on track” for its year-one commitments to the government to provide world-class telecommunications services by July 2020.
“Our edge is that we’ve embraced early on that collaboration, partnership and building new synergies are ways for us to ensure delivery of our commitments to the Filipino,” DITO Telecommunity chief administrative officer Adel Tamano said.
Tamano was referring to more than 12,000 consumer retail touch points that Udenna Corp. and its subsidiaries provide with its current network.
Tamano said DITO acquired more than 3,000 sites for infrastructure development while construction was underway.
He said that since October 2019, DITO signed various agreements with tower construction and key contractor companies like the LCS Group of Chavit Singson, China Energy Equipment Co. Ltd., Filipino-Malaysian consortium Zeal Power Construction & Development Corp., Leo Technologies Infrastructure Corp. and Alt-Global-Solutions Inc.
“While these inroads are for the most part not visible to the general public, working with our partners guarantees we have the critical pieces in place. The data centers of DITO are very close to completion, fiber resources to link the entire network have been leased from partners like SkyCable, and our very own fiber network is under construction as well,” Tamano said.
DITO earlier said it would invest P20.5 billion over a five-year period to build a data center in Clark Global City in Central Luzon.
“All of these together give us every confidence that we will meet our first year commitments,” he said.
DITO Telecommunity received its certificate of public convenience and necessity from the National Telecommunications Commission in July to operate as the third major telco.
The company committed to improve the country’s telecommunications capability within five years by increasing the basic internet speed to 55 mbps and covering more than 80 percent of the population.