Globe Telecom of the Philippines boosted its overall LTE footprint by about 10% in January-March 2018, to meet rising demand for ultra-high speed mobile internet services.
A report in the Inquirer newspaper says that the telecoms giant installed and commissioned 934 new LTE sites in the first quarter to a total of 11,300 cell sites, with new areas including more remote areas such as Jolo, Tawi-Tawi and Batanes. In addition, Globe was at pains to note that its current rollout is aimed at ‘making full use of the spectrum assets currently assigned to Globe,’ as per the broad remit of the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT’s) spectrum management policy. Globe has ring-fenced about USD850 million in capital spending for 2018, most of which would be used to bolster data services. It has also deployed more than 200 Massive MIMO sites in its network, it said, as part of a longer term shift to 5G. Massive MIMO is seen as a fundamental radio access technology for 5G, with Globe noting: ‘The 5G network targets to have higher speeds, lower latency and better capacity, enabling higher density of mobile broadband users and supports device-to-device connectivity and massive machine communications’.