Filipino behemoth PLDT Inc. announced yesterday (1 September) that it plans to double its domestic network capacity to 92Tbps by the end of 2021 to deal with a surge in demand from its users. In the disclosure, the company noted that the capacity upgrade will benefits residential and business customers alike, and cater for anticipated growth in its subscriber base. President and CEO Alfredo S Panlilio confirmed: ‘We are increasing capacity ahead of demand to enable Filipinos to thrive and secure a better future’. The official went on to note that data bandwidth-hungry applications have massively increased the telco’s utilisation rate. Panlilio explained that in terms of mobile data traffic alone, PLDT has experienced a 17% year-on-year increase in traffic to 1,579 Petabytes in 1H21, while monthly data use in the second quarter of this year rose 11% y-o-y to 267 Petabytes.
PLDT has rolled out a fibre footprint spanning 524,000km at 30 June 2021 and increased the number of homes passed to over 11.3 million. Furthermore, it reported that 4.8 million available ports are ready ‘to service more households and support their work-from-home and study-from-home arrangements’.