PH tower sharing attracts more firms

THREE more foreign tower companies (towercos) on Tuesday signaled their intent to enter the Philippine tower sharing business.

American Tower Corp., Frontier Tower Solutions, and the Philippine Tower Consortium of Myanmar’s Global Network Inc. and Japan-based JTower Inc., signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT).

The government’s push for common tower has now enticed a total of 11 groups, including IHS Towers, Malaysia-based edotco Group, ISOC Infrastructures, Singapore’s ISON ECP Tower Pte. Ltd., China Energy Engineering Corporation (CEEC), Malaysia’s RT Telecom, Aboitiz InfraCapital, and Villar Group’s MGS Construction Inc.

Opening the industry to more players aims to hasten the deployment of 50,000 cell sites across the Philippines. Currently, the country has less than 20,000 towers. Globe Telecom and PLDT Inc. said towercos would face the same dilemma in building towers, such as securing more than 20 permits just to establish a single cell site, but the DICT vowed it would assist tower providers.

With the implementation of the Ease of Doing Business Act or Republic Act 11032, the agency said the processing of at least 25 permits for the deployment of towers would only take seven days, versus the usual eight-month period. Under the MoU, the DICT will provide support once the groups secured business transactions with a telco carrier, where the entity would use its shared cell sites.

Top officials of both PLDT and Globe earlier revealed some towercos had started initiating talks with them for the common tower. “A number of these tower companies have approached us, and we said we’re willing to cooperate in respect to new towers,” PLDT Chair Manuel Pangilinan said last month.

Globe Chief Executive Officer and President Ernest Cu also expressed support to the common tower initiative, but still insisted existing telcos must still be allowed to build their own.

LISBET K. ESMAEL