MANILA, Philippines, September 11, 2012 - Telecoms leader PLDT has completed its massive two-year P67 billion ($1.6 billion) capital expenditure program for the modernization of its network ahead of schedule that will significantly enhance service quality and reliability and more than triple voice and data capacity.
 
“The Group’s investments have produced a network that is unrivalled in terms of coverage, capacity, and resiliency,” PLDT President and CEO Napoleon L. Nazareno said.
 
“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 sites and a transport network that rides on over 48,000 kilometers of fiber assets with an additional 6,000 kilometers of Fiber-to-the-Home rolled out,” he pointed out.
 
This brings the PLDT Group’s total fiber assets to 54,000 kilometers which are more than four times the 12,000 kilometers of fiber network being built by competition.
 
“We are close to covering the whole of Metro Manila with the more reliable and faster fiber connection and gaining momentum in servicing the rest of the country,” Nazareno said.
 
He added that the PLDT Group through its cellular subsidiaries, Smart Communications and Sun Cellular, has established an access network that is enabled with 3G and Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technologies, with 3G coverage reaching majority of the population and LTE piloting in a growing number of areas.
 
These developments come at the heels of a core network upgrade that would boost PLDT’s domestic fiber optic network (DFON) with 100G Technology and the completion of an international undersea cable system that more than doubled the Group’s international bandwidth capacity.
 
“No other provider comes close to the network that we have now, not just in terms of capacity but more importantly, in terms of resiliency and efficiency,” Nazareno stressed.
 
“We are now in the best position to meet the demands of the future. We are extremely prepared for data explosion,” he added.
 
Recent studies suggest that mobile data traffic alone will grow by ten-fold in the next four years. For the PLDT Group alone, mobile internet revenues nearly doubled with 97% growth in the first half of the year compared to the year-ago level.
 
At the back-end, the Group’s IT modernization involves technology refreshment and group-wide optimization and convergence of IT systems and platforms for customer relations management, operations support, billing, business intelligences, enterprise resources, and settlements.