The country’s telcos recently presented a blueprint to Malacañang to reach Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Areas (GIDAs) by expanding network infrastructure with new tower builds between 2025 and 2028.

In a recent meeting of the Private Sector Advisory Council (PSAC), the body’s Connectivity Plan Task Force (CPTF), headed by Ernest Cu, Globe President and CEO, proposed the construction of new towers in remote parts of the country through a public-private collaboration.

This groundbreaking initiative is in line with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s’ pledge in his last State of the Nation Address to bring connectivity to remote areas.

The proposal aims to bridge the digital divide by delivering essential telecom services to the Philippines’ most underserved communities. Currently, 7,063 barangays are classified as Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Areas (GIDAs), home to nearly 25 million residents.

At the meeting, Cu shared that as of 2024, over 600 Globe cell sites were already operational in GIDAs.

In a major push to expand coverage, the country’s three Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), including Globe, proposed to maximize utilization of existing towers and build new infrastructure in GIDAs. The telcos also proposed to provide SIMs with data plans through government subsidy to unconnected Filipino households between this year and 2028.

The SIMs will include automatic monthly load seeding of 50GB for a year, which can cover the average usage of a five-member household. This ensures that even remote communities can be connected with mobile signals and the internet, enhancing their access to education, healthcare, government services, and economic opportunities.

“The telco industry is fully dedicated to leveraging our partnership within the industry and with the government to reach underserved areas where the private sector has been unable to build because of the negative cost to business,” said Cu.

“Once the government lays a bigger stake in our push for inclusive connectivity and invests in our proposal, this will mark a milestone in our collective aspiration for a Digital Philippines. Together, we will be able to create pathways to opportunities and essential services that can significantly improve lives,” he added.

By maximizing the use of existing sites while strategically building new ones in underserved areas, the project will minimize overlaps among providers and optimize coverage across the country. This allows each barangay in GIDAs to receive telco support from at least one provider, avoiding unnecessary competition and duplication of efforts in a single area.

Beyond the immediate infrastructure rollout, the CPTF is also advocating for critical legislative support to strictly enforce the streamlining of permitting process for new cell sites, ensure consistent energization for telco towers, and rationalize spectrum user fees.

These policy reforms are essential for the efficient deployment of new infrastructure, enabling telcos to serve GIDAs without encountering unnecessary regulatory hurdles.

In its Digital 2024 report released in January this year, Data Reportal said 26.4% or over a quarter of Filipinos “remained offline” at the start of the year, indicating that while robust connectivity has been achieved in the country, still a number of the Philippine population lacked internet access.

Marcos earlier vowed to improve connectivity infrastructure in the country, saying his administration would pave the way for policy reforms and nationwide enforcement of streamlined processes to remove hurdles to connectivity expansion.

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