Smart shortlisted as Asia’s top digital services provider

Smart Communications is one of only three companies shortlisted at the prestigious Asia Communication Awards (ACA) as the continent’s best digital services provider.

Also in the running for the award are Indosat Ooredoo of Indonesia and Singtel Dash of Singapore. The winner will be announced on May 24 in an awarding ceremony in Singapore.

Smart’s Welcome Change campaign has also been shortlisted as Best Brand Campaign, along with projects from the Bankai Group, Airtel Business in India, and Progresif Cellular in Brunei.

Organized annually by London-based industry publication Total Telecom, the ACA recognizes outstanding performance by Asian carriers, multimedia content providers, vendors, and other communication service providers.

Digital transformation

In 2016, Smart and parent company PLDT launched a $1-billion digital transformation program to enable their fixed and mobile networks to support the rising demand for digital services. Smart has committed to progressively deploy LTE services to 95 percent of the country’s cities and municipalities by end-2018. The company is combining low-band frequencies for better indoor penetration and wider coverage, with high-band frequencies for additional capacity.

Smart has finished its LTE deployment in Boracay and Metro Davao, where average LTE download speed has quadrupled to 17 Mbps. Efforts are ongoing in Metro Cebu and Metro Manila, but improvements are already being felt. For instance, an average download speed of 16.3 Mbps and an average upload speed of 13.4 Mbps on Smart’s LTE service have been recorded in the southern Metro Manila cities of Las Piñas, Taguig, Parañaque, and Muntinlupa.

Welcome change

To communicate its digital pivot, Smart unveiled a new logo resembling the Greek letter Delta which means change. Smart also launched the Welcome Change campaign to encourage Filipinos to empower themselves through digital and mobile innovations.

To help Filipinos discover what the digital life has to offer, Smart is expanding its library of relevant content through partnerships with the likes of iflix, Netflix, Cignal, ABS-CBN’s iWantTV, and recently, Fox. Smart is also partnering with device makers like Vivo, Oppo, O+ USA, MyPhone, and Starmobile to be able to offer smartphones, especially LTE devices, at different price points.

On top of these efforts, Smart continues to introduce affordable and value-packed products such as GigaSurf50 which offers 1.3GB of data valid for three days, for only P50.

String of int’l accolades

Smart has won several awards at the ACA, including Operator of the Year in 2011 and 2012.