PLDT to keep spending at record levels

As it set its highest ever capital expenditures at more than P50 billion this year, PLDT Inc. will keep spending at record levels over the next two years to continue network improvements and deliver better services to customers.

In a statement, the telco and digital services provider said its capex, which would exceed P50 billion this year, is expected to stay at that level over the next two years.

“What this means is that for every P1 of service revenue, we reinvest between 30-35 centavos in the business to supercharge our networks and advance our digital transformation program. This is a massive effort to turn our networks into powerful, pervasive and resilient platforms for delivering relevant digital services and solutions that our people can use to improve their daily lives, as well as enable the country to compete and thrive in this digital age,” PLDT chairman and chief executive officer Manuel V. Pangilinan said.

With PLDT’s spending expected to stay at record high levels, the group would continue to work on doubling the capacity of both the mobile and fixed-line businesses.

For mobile, PLDT wireless unit Smart Communications Inc. would be doubling the number of Long Term Evolution (LTE) base stations to about 17,700 and increase the number of LTE-equipped cell sites to over 6,800 in the next 12 to 18 months.

The number of 3G base stations over the same period, meanwhile, will rise to over 12,400, and the count of cell sites equipped with new 3G base stations will grow to over 8,000.

Base stations refer to the radio equipment operating on a specific frequency band such as 700 Megahertz (Mhz), 1800 Mhz or 2100 Mhz, while cell sites are the towers or structures housing base stations.

Most of the new LTE and 3G base stations would be utilizing frequencies acquired from San Miguel Corp. in 2016.

Smart ended 2017 with over 4,300 LTE cell sites and more than 8,700 LTE base stations, as well as 7,500 3G cell sites and 9,850 3G base stations.

The PLDT wireless unit also intends to roll out LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) to provide greater capacity and faster speeds than LTE through carrier aggregation or the combination of two or more radio frequency bands in more areas of the country.

Smart is also deploying another LTE-A based technology called 4x4 Multiple Input, Multiple Output which would boost the efficiency of available radio frequencies by using multiple antennas for transmitting and receiving radio signals. Such is useful for areas with highly concentrated population of mobile phone users.

For the fixed line business, PLDT will double the fiber and hybrid fiber broadband capacity to over 2.2 million ports, with about 650,000 of the additional ports for fiber, and another 550,000 for hybrid fiber broadband.

The move to expand the reach of PLDT’s fiber network would also upgrade copperbased broadband service to hybrid fiber connections and by 2019, all of PLDT’s 1.2 million copper-based DSL subscribers would be able to enjoy fiber-fast internet.

PLDT is likewise further expanding the fixed broadband coverage by about 30 percent to 5.1 million homes passed, so that within the next five-year cycle of network development or from 2021 to 2025, it could have as many as 10 million homes passed with fiber-to-the-home.

“The net result is that within the next 12 to 18 months world-class internet services on PLDT’s super-charged fixed and mobile networks will be available to many more Filipinos in many more parts of the country,” Pangilinan said.

Part of PLDT’s network transformation program is the expansion of the fiber optic cable.

After having over 174,000 kilometers (km) by the end of last year, PLDT will add fiber cables and raise the total to nearly 210,000 km by the end of this year.

In addition, PLDT will also continue to expand international cable systems as the bulk of the internet content accessed by Filipinos are from overseas.