DITO Telecommunity Corp., a joint venture of businessman Dennis Uy and China Telecoms, said it has sufficient money to fund the rollout of telecom services nationwide.
“We have already drawn from the initial facility worth $500 million through the Bank of China,” DITO chief administrative officer Adel Tamano said.
The company vowed to invest P257 billion over a five-year period, including P150 billion in its first year of operations.
Tamano said the company was on track to meet the March 2021 commercial rollout as set by the National Telecommunications Commission under its certificate of public convenience and necessity.
“We are on track. We are going to be launching this telco … By July, we would have a technical launch, the first audit that the government will do,” Tamano said.
He said the network would be ready with 37-percent coverage and 27 mbps speed by July this year.
“We don’t want to give the same lousy service. That’s why we have a technical launch. We want all the underlying things to be ironed out for customers before the commercial launch,” Tamano said.
Tamano said there was a misunderstanding between technical launch and the commercial launch of its telecom services.
Tamano said that by September, DITO would conduct pre-commercial trial to test the stability of its network.
“We have a very ambitious goal to reinvent the telco industry. We’re confident that we could offer better products,” Tamano said.
DITO chief technology officer Rodolfo Santiago said the company already has 600 cell sites nationwide and expects to increase it to 1,600 cell sites by July.
“We will test the stability before we launch … We wanted to test the network before the commercial launch. We don’t want to frustrate the already frustrated public,” he said.
Tamano also asked the public to understand the company on the long process before the commercial launch to make sure the reliability and stability of its network.
The group committed to provide 27 megabits per second of internet speed in its first year and 55 mbps in five years.
The company plans to cover 84 percent of the population in five years and 34 percent in its first year of operations.