Globe Telecom Inc. said Thursday said it built 542 new cell sites and upgraded 5,087 mobile sites to LTE across the country in the first half of the year amid sustained demand for connectivity.
The telecom unit of the Ayala Group also deployed about 148,000 fiber-to-the-home lines as of June 2023, as it continues to optimize its existing fiber inventory.
It said that from January to June 2023, it invested P37.7 billion primarily for infrastructure development, a figure that is expected to increase to P71.5 billion or $1.3 billion by yearend. A significant 90 percent of the budget supports growing data requirements of Filipinos for learning, earning and leisure activities.
“We employ a targeted way of prioritizing network rollouts and optimizations in areas that matter, hence, we are able to sustain our most reliable network. We also believe that network reliability― a metric that is difficult to achieve― is more important than just speed because, on a small screen, there’s just so much that higher speeds can deliver in terms of improving the actual perceptible experience,” said Darius Delgado, head of Globe consumer mobile business.
“What matters most is that customers benefit from reliable service when and where they need it. Hence, we invest more in reliability versus just speed,” he said.
Globe earned the title of “Most Reliable Mobile Network in the Philippines” by Ookla five times in a row, based on analysis of Speedtest Intelligence data from the second quarter of 2022 through fourth quarter of 2022, and fist quarter of 2023 and second quarter of 2023.