Friday, March 29, 2024

PLDT, Globe beef up digital infrastructure of Davao City

With former Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte now the country?s most powerful politician, local telcos have unfurled plans to upgrade the digital infrastructure of Mindanao?s premier city.

Photo credit: davaocity.gov.ph
Photo credit: davaocity.gov.ph

Both PLDT and Globe Telecom have announced major ICT projects in the city to take advantage of the booming business brought about by the rise to power of Duterte.

PLDT, for instance, said it will complete three major ICT projects in the city by September: the company?s fourth cable landing station, an Innolab or innovation laboratory, and the PLDT Group?s eighth data center.

The cable landing station in Davao to be fired up by the end of the month will directly link PLDT Group?s network in Mindanao to all three existing international gateways in Nasugbu, Batangas; Bauang, La Union, and Daet, Camarines Norte. This will improve resiliency and latency of international data traffic going in and out of Mindanao.

This also connects Mindanao to PLDT?s international managed network that has points-of-presence (POP) in Hong Kong, Singapore, US and United Kingdom, and provides a high bandwidth global connectivity with automatic re-routing and switching capability through different international cable routes in the event of cable faults.

The Innolab facility, located at Poblacion in Davao City, will serve as the PLDT Group?s hub for available services and technology innovations for the region?s businesses and local communities.

It will help showcase how these new technologies can benefit commercial operations and improve efficiencies in businesses, and will also offer educational tours to schools, beneficial especially for engineering and IT students.The showroom can also serve as a venue for local hackathon events to support local programmers and developers.

PLDT currently has seven Innolab facilities across the country, including the recently opened showroom at the Makati central business district.

Like most of the data centers in the PLDT Group?s network, the data center in Davao will be designed to meet global data center standards and will obtain the certifications required by industries with heavy data-security requirements like banks and financial institutions.

The data center can accommodate hosting, collocation, and business continuity services for enterprises. It will also be a suitable secondary back-up location for businesses with data already housed in other data centers across the country.

The PLDT Group currently operates seven data centers in the country with the recent addition of its largest data center situated in Makati City. It targets to expand its data center facilities to 10 by 2017 with a rack capacity of over 9,000 ? the largest by any provider in the country.

Globe Telecom, meanwhile, is building up its network infrastructure in the city that includes the construction of a data center and the Philippine end of an international undersea cable system.

“Enterprises located in northern and central Philippines may consider the data center as the primary site for Mindanao and secondary site of Luzon and Visayas in the event of natural or man-made disasters,? said Globe president and CEO Ernest Cu.

According to him, the data center, which is situated in the same location as the SEA-US cable landing station, will cater to BPOs, financial institutions, internet service providers and other content providers in southern Philippines.

He said the facility is Seismic Zone 4 compliant, which means that it has been retrofitted for earthquake safety. Also, infrastructure and redundant security solutions have been put in place to ensure that systems remain continuously available and secure.

The data center is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2017.

The SEA-US cable system, on the other hand, will ease the country?s dependence on international cable systems routed through northern Philippines, said Cu.

This could prevent a repeat of a 2008 incident where major international cables were broken because of the Taiwan earthquake. As a result, the Philippines became isolated for a few days in terms of internet connectivity.

To date, Globe already completed the construction of the Davao Power Feed Equipment, a facility that will address the energy requirement of SEA-US cable system.

At a project cost of approximately $250 million, the SEA-US undersea cable system will provide superior latency, delivering an additional 20 Terabits per/second capacity, utilizing the latest 100 gigabits per second transmission technology. Such additional capacity will cater to the exponential growth of bandwidth between the two continents.

The SEA-US cable is being built by a consortium of 7 international telecommunication companies, that include Globe Telecom and will link 5 countries and territories that include Manado (Indonesia), Davao (Philippines), Piti (Guam), Oahu (Hawaii, United States) and Los Angeles (California, United States).

The SEA-US project will be approximately 15,000 kilometers in length, provides route diversity from the North Pacific, avoiding earthquake prone areas in East Asia. The cable system is expected to provide more efficient connectivity to approximately 1.5 billion people.

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