Smart Communications, Inc. (Smart) launched its 5G roaming service in South Korea in partnership with KT Corp., Korea's largest telecommunications company.
This year, as the world prepares to ease travel restrictions amid the worldwide vaccine rollout, Smart plans to launch more 5G roaming partne
While local telcos have stepped up the rollout of cell sites nationwide, the numbers have not come up to a third of the Philippines' neighbors in the region.
The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC)'s latest report to Malacanang showed that the country now has a total of 22,834 cell sites
Published January 3, 2021, 6:00 AM
Year-Ender
The pandemic did not wreak as much devastation in the telecom sector as it did in transportation, property and trade.
In a locked down world, the mantra of businesses became: digitalize or die.
Most of the country’s over 100 million locked down population went online, working and studying from home, making purchases on the web and resorting to telemedicine.
Digital was suddenly equated with safety as face-to-face interaction heightened contagion.
People developed an aversion to physical cash as well, prematurely forcing transactions to go contactless.
And while lockdown froze ongoing upgrades and expansion, the telecom duopoly resumed building immediately though they pared down their capex.
Published December 22, 2020, 4:13 PM
PLDT Inc. and wireless subsidiary Smart Communications, Inc. (Smart) secured over 6,500 permits to build cell sites in the second half of 2020, after the government cut the red tape.
Since July, Smart secured over 2,500 permits to build more cell sites while PLDT secured around 4,000 permits.
“Despite the challenges of COVID-19 and the lockdowns, we managed to ramp up our network rollout, with the help of government,” according to Alfredo S. Panlilio, Smart Communications President and CEO and PLDT Chief Revenue Officer.
PLDT’s fiber infrastructure is now at more than 422,000 kilometers. This supports Smart’s mobile networks, which cover 96% of the population and are present in 95% of cities and municipalities.