Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT) has revealed it hopes to complete the migration of its legacy copper wire platform to a next generation network (NGN) by early 2012, in a move it says will give it increased flexibility when offering bundled products for its voice, data and video services.
Speaking in October 2009 the company’s president Napoleon Nazareno confirmed that by that date, PLDT had moved a total of 540,000 fixed line customers to its NGN, a figure which had increased to around 600,000 by the year end. 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 a press interview at the time, Nazareno said: ‘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 has allocated PHP4 billion (USD86.2 million) capital expenditures for the rollout of the NGN this year, which is part of its total PHP28.1 billion CAPEX allocation for 2010.