MANILA — The management of Smart Communications announced Wednesday that it expects to complete the upgrade of its cell sites in Quezon City within this month. Hopes are high that with the completion, delivery of mobile services in the country’s most populous city would improve substantially.
Smart management, in a statement, said it has stepped up the deployment of Long-Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) and carrier aggregation (CA) technology across Metro Manila to enhance the mobile data experience of its subscribers. The telco claims that LTE download speeds are ranging from 29 megabits per second (Mbps) to 224 Mbps in such areas as Batasang Pambansa and Quezon City Memorial Circle.
The company also reported that the average daily data revenue increased by 23 percent while LTE device usage was also up by 33 percent between September 2017 and March 2018. To meet the growing subscribers’ needs, Smart said it has doubled the number of LTE base stations and rolled out more cell sites in Quezon City last year to increase their capacity to handle more calls, text and data traffic.
“These network upgrades in Quezon City and in other parts of the metro and the country are part of our broader effort to deliver world-class internet service to our customers,” Mario G. Tamayo, PLDT and Smart Senior Vice President for Network Planning and Engineering, said.
Quezon City Mayor Herbert Bautista reportedly expressed his gratitude to the company as it has recently installed a high-speed public WiFi hotspot at the City Hall and upgraded their mobile Internet services in the city. “PLDT-Smart are not only commendable corporate citizens of the City but more importantly, they are our strategic partners,” Bautista was quoted as saying.
Parent company PLDT has allocated PHP 58 billion as capital expenditures for 2018 that will be utilized for the rollout of its fiber broadband services and mobile network deployment by providing high-capacity links for cellular base stations, the telco said in the same statement. (PR)
