Globe Telecom shares three-year coverage rollout forecast with NTC

Globe Telecom has submitted its three-year coverage rollout plan to the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) of the Philippines. The telco is committed to provide mobile services, including voice, SMS and data, to 95% of municipalities and cities in the country by the end of 2018 using the additional spectrum it acquired from San Miguel.

The rollout plan is one of the conditions set by the NTC in approving the co-use agreement covering the spectrum resources that Globe acquired from the joint buyout of San Miguel’s telco assets.

In a letter, dated July 29, 2016, addressed to NTC Commissioner Gamaliel Cordoba, Globe General Counsel Froilan Castelo said Globe had started to implement the rollout plan in June and will be deploying about 4,500 multiband, multimode software-defined radio base station equipment and capacity upgrades to improve overall customer experience in terms of speed and reliability of its mobile services.

Currently, Globe provides mobile broadband services across its entire network, having fully upgraded to 100% 4G network while more than 60% of its sites are now equipped with LTE for mobile broadband services, Castelo said. Just after two months of gaining access to the spectrum assets, Globe has already upgraded over 25 cell sites with LTE 700 megahertz and more than 600 cell sites with additional 2600 MHz spectrum and about 1,500 cell sites with additional 1,800 MHz spectrum as part of the company’s commitment to improve mobile Internet speeds within one year.

Castelo said the three-year coverage rollout plan took into consideration priority areas with substantial existing demand and high traffic growth trends; key development areas to further promote the country’s overall economic development; maximum use of Globe-assigned frequencies for the 700 MHz, 1,800 MHz, 2,300 MHz and 2,600 MHz frequencies. By year-end, the company expects that about 2,200 of the company’s existing cell sites, representing over 30% if its network nationwide, will be upgraded using the additional spectrum from the co-use agreement, he said.

“We would like to assure the commission that we are utilising all available resources and doing all we can to improve the mobile experience of our customers. We are committed to pursue our aggressive mobile broadband coverage and capacity expansion programmes in order to meet mobile data traffic growth and increasing demand for mobile connectivity. We are confident that our strategy of combining new site builds with efficient use of spectrum resources and adopting new broadband wireless technologies such as LTE-Advanced will allow us to satisfy the changing needs of our mobile customers,” Castelo said.

Globe is also committed to provide ultra fast Internet to 2 million households over 20,000 barangays (neighbourhoods) by 2020.