Dominant carrier PLDT reported that its domestic and fiber footprint has breached 1 million kilometers, consisting of over 231,000 kilometers of international fiber and almost 860,000 kilometers of domestic fiber.
“Our sustained investments in our network rollout have allowed us to continuously improve customer experience nationwide. Our fast and reliable network has been enabling companies’ hybrid work set-ups, online banking, and payments for enterprises of all sizes, as well as the government’s initiatives to digitalize the Philippines,” Eric Santiago, PLDT network head, said.
As of end-September, PLDT’s fiber infrastructure has passed some 16.8 million homes in 67% of the country’s cities and municipalities. It also supports PLDT’s wireless subsidiary Smart Communications’ 77,200 base stations, including 7,300 5G base stations and close to 40,000 4G/LTE base stations deployed nationwide. Smart’s network covers 97% of the population with 3G, LTE, and 5G.
In the first nine months of the year, PLDT also built 1.29 million additional fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) ports, bringing total FTTH capacity to 5.9 million.
PLDT also recently announced the start of the initial phase of cable construction of the 9,400-kilometer subsea cable Asia Direct Cable (ADC) in Batangas, with target completion of all landing links at the end of 2023.
When completed, ADC will link seven international cable landing points in the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and China. Once fully equipped, this will provide PLDT an additional international network capacity of at least 36 Tbps for faster delivery of hyperscale data across East and Southeast Asia.
The upcoming activation of ADC and Apricot cables systems will increase to 19 the number of international submarine cable systems of PLDT, which includes the recently energized Jupiter Cable System. Once fully equipped, PLDT’s current international network capacity of 60 Tbps will expand to over 130 Tbps.
