MALACAÑANG remains confident it can overcome all legal hurdles to improve the telecommunications sector amid the planned entry of a Chinese firm as a third player in the sector, an official said Tuesday.
“Because there’s a third operator that was invited to come in, that’s already fraught with challenges,” Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque said.
“There will be legal challenges, but we are confident we can overcome all these challenges.”
China Telecommunications Corp. is studying investing. Palacein the telecoms sector in the Philippines after President Rodrigo Duterte invited it to enter the country and challenge local phone carriers PLDT Inc. and Globe Telecom Inc.
The Chinese government, which controls its phone carriers, picked China Telecom to be the one entering the Philippines, Communications Secretary Martin Andanar said Sunday, citing information from a Cabinet meeting last week.
China Telecom would have to look for a local partner with an existing franchise and a significant presence in the Philippines, Andanar said.
The Department of Information and Communications Technology is urging telecommunications companies interested to become the third major player in the industry to invest in the installation of fixed lines to further improve the Internet service.
“The main reason why we have one of the slowest and expensive Internet access in the region is that most of us, if not all, connect to the Internet via Globe and Smart mobile networks,” DICT officer-in-charge Eliseo Rio said in a social media post on Tuesday.
“But they have only 20,000 cell sites, such that around more than 5,000 subscribers share a tower when the more ideal ratio should be one tower per 1,000 subscribers. We need at least 67,000 cell sites to just compare with Vietnam,” Rio said.
Among legal challenges that the Philippine Competition Commission had earlier asked the Supreme Court to weigh in May 2016 was the sale of San Miguel Corp.’s telecommunications unit to industry giants PLDT Inc. and Globe Telecom.
The move comes after the 12th division of the Court of Appeals, acting on a petition from PLDT, recently blocked the antitrust body’s attempts to review the almost P70-billion transaction involving the disputed 700 Megahertz band.
The 700MHz, previously almost fully controlled by San Miguel Corp., is an LTE frequency valued for its ability to efficiently cover wide areas and penetrate walls with high-speed mobile Internet.
“Take note that we are still in the process of hearing a case involving the frequencies that was awarded to what should have been the third player and the buyers of that frequency are still challenging before the Supreme Court now whether or not the Competition Commission can even look into the merger,” Roque said. With Bloomberg and PNA
Roque said the invitation to have state-owned China Telecoms invest in the country was a “political decision” brought up in a recent bilateral negotiations between the Philippines and China. With Bloomberg and PNA
