Globe Telecom Inc. said on Monday it submitted a three-year coverage rollout plan to the National Telecommunications Commission as part of the conditions set by the regulator when it acquired the assets of San Miguel Corp.
Under the three-year plan, Globe committed to provide mobile services, including voice, texts and data to 95 percent of municipalities and cities in the country by the end of 2018, using the additional spectrum it acquired from San Miguel.
Globe lawyer Froilan Castelo said his company started to implement the rollout plan in June and would deploy about 4,500 multiband, multimode software defined radio base station equipment and capacity upgrades to improve overall customer experience in terms of speed and reliability of its mobile services.
Globe currently provides mobile broadband services across its entire network, having fully upgraded to 100 percent 4G network, while more than 60 percent of its sites are now equipped with LTE for mobile broadband services.
Just after two months of gaining access to the spectrum assets, Globe has already upgraded over 25 cell sites with LTE 700 megahertz and more than 600 cell sites with additional 2600 MHz spectrum and about 1,500 cell sites with additional 1800 MHz spectrum as part of the company’s commitment to improve mobile internet speeds within one year.
Castelo said the three-year coverage rollout plan took into consideration certain conditions that include priority areas with substantial existing demand and high traffic growth trends, key development areas to further promote the country’s overall economic development and maximum use of Globe assigned frequencies for the 700 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2300 MHz and 2600 MHz.
By yearend, Globe expects that about 2,200 of the company’s existing cell sites representing over 30 percent of its network nationwide will be upgraded using the additional spectrum from the co-use agreement.