Smart Communications, the mobile arm of Filipino telecoms group PLDT, says it intends to extend its 4G LTEcoverage to 50% of all the country’s cities and municipalities by the end of this year, part of its three-year network rollout plan to make 4G services available to 95% of cities and municipalities by the end of 2018. ‘We are committed to bring Smart LTE to more areas in the Philippines and to make it available to even more Filipinos,’ PLDT and Smart Senior Vice-President for Network Planning and Engineering Mario Tamayo said in a statement, as reported by BusinessWorld. ‘We target to blanket with LTE close to half of the country’s cities and municipalities, covering 70% of the population, by the end of this year,’ he added. Smart is currently re-equipping its cell sites to use lower bands such as 700MHz and 850MHz to improve indoor coverage penetration, while simultaneously rolling out LTE at 1800MHz and 2100MHz to increase the cell sites’ capacity to handle more calls, texts, and mobile data traffic.