MANILA, Philippines—Telecommunications giant Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. is investing P560 million to triple its Internet gateway capacity, bracing for a rapid rise in broadband customers in the next few years.
“Every Filipino who uses Facebook or Twitter, watches YouTube or searches on Google will benefit from this program,” PLDT-Smart technology group head Rolando Peña said in a press statement on Tuesday. “This will also provide improved services for the outsourcing industry and other businesses that rely heavily on the Internet.”
The Internet gateway is the network facility that handles Internet traffic going to and from servers located outside the Philippines. The more users who access the Internet, the heavier the traffic that passes through the gateway and thus the greater the danger of congestion, unless network capacity is upgraded.
“Internet usage is expected to rise rapidly in the next few years, especially as we introduce new access technologies such as Smart’s LTE and PLDT’s fiber-to-the-home services. This investment in our super-charged network will enable us to stay ahead of the expected video-driven data deluge and provide reliable and robust services to our customers,” Peña said.
LTE, or Long Term Evolution, or “4G,” is a high-performance standard for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals.
The first tranche of PLDT’s Internet gateway expansion program will be completed by the end of the year with an initial investment of P205 million. This will bring PLDT’s international gateway capacity to 600 Gigabits per second—double its current capacity, or 10 times PLDT’s capacity less than five years ago.
Internet gateway capacity is seen as critical for the Philippines since the bulk of content accessed by Filipinos, such as Facebook, sits in servers outside the Philippines.
“A network’s Internet gateway should grow in terms of traffic handling capacity; otherwise, users will experience difficulty connecting to the Internet or the content they would like to access,” Peña pointed out.