PLDT says 540,000 customers now using NGN

Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) has so far moved a total of 540,000 fixed line customers to its next generation network (NGN), its president Napoleon Nazareno is quoted by the BusinessMirror as saying. The telco sees the migration to an IP backbone network as a key priority if it is to re-galvanise its core fixed voice telephony business which has weakened with the rise in popularity of mobile phone services. In an interview Nazareno told the paper: ‘We are doing very well. About 30% of our 1.8 million landline subscribers have been migrated to NGN … We started the migration two years ago. To migrate the whole facility and become NGN-capable will take two to three years. But we will try to accelerate this because this is part of our project to put broadband all over the country and provide more robust speed.’ PLDT’s 2009 CAPEX of PHP10 billion (USD210 million) includes significant investment in the NGN as well as monies to be allocated for improvements to its international gateway facilities and backbone network. Nazareno declined to put an exact figure on how much would be set aside for the NGN programme, but suggested that overall investment spend in this area could reach PHP4.4 billion.