PLDT Group on Thursday said it is building a least two cable landing stations in the country in a bid to serve customers’ increasing deed for data. 

Manuel V Pangilinan, PLDT chairman and chief executive said  as an integrated network, PLDT and Smart are able to invest in international connectivity “like nobody else can.” 

These include submarine cables, also made of fiber, which connect its network to the rest of the world.  PLDT and Smart are part of a network of 16 international cable systems.

 “We are investing in more,” he said. 

“We already have three cable landing stations and at least two more coming up next year. I think that’s something a single fixed broadband operator cannot do. In particular, when they have to grow outside of the big main post, it becomes very costly to lay all the fiber in the country. We can do that because we are using fiber not only for fiber-to-the-home but also for mobile and for Enterprise customers,” Panglinan added.

PLDT earlier joined an international consortium to build the Asia Direct Cable (ADC), a high performance submarine cable connecting the Philippines to other Asian countries, allowing it to support bandwidth-intensive applications such as 5G, cloud services,  internet- of-things, and artificial  intelligence.

As an integrated telco service, PLDT and Smart are also able to offer more products to the market. “PLDT and Smart offers include mobile internet, as well as your fixed wireless and fiber-to-the-home (FTTH),”  Alfredo S. Panlilio, president and chief executive of Smart and PLDT chief revenue officer said. 

PLDT’s vast network, the most extensive and advanced digital transport network in the country at 395,000 kilometers as of end-September 2020, supports all the internet delivery platforms such as fiber fixed broadband, mobile data services, via 4G and increasingly 5G, and carrier-grade WiFi.

 Ongoing expansion work will extend PLDT’s fiber footprint by another 81,000 kms, 31,000 kms more in 2020 and 50,000 in 2021.

In addition, the Company’s backbone network capacity as of end-September 2020 is at 55 terabits per second. With its ongoing works, PLDT is looking to increase this capacity further by another 37 terabits per second to serve customers’ continuously growing demand for data and deliver technologies like 5G, LTE, and FTTH.

On 5G technology, Pangilinan said that “5G without fiber will not work, and therefore we have a high synergy between the various networks. In the last couple of years, we have deployed the strategy called ‘follow the fiber.’ Wherever there is fiber, we can connect any business, fiber-to-the-home, fiber-to-the-enterprise, and fiber-to-the-base-station.”

PLDT and Smart have passed 8.3 million homes and intend to deliver more improved services, and ensure a future-proof, reliable, and resilient network by focusing on expanding and upgrading their entire network ecosystem which consists of 9,892 cell sites, 56,799 base stations, 3.81 million ports for outside plant facilities, and 25 core data centers.