BAGUIO CITY – Smart Telecommunications welcomed the plan of President Rodrigo Duterte to invite more foreign telecommunications companies to invest in the country, opening the competition in the telecommunications industry.
Jose Rosete, Smart Telecommunications head for external affairs, said the telecommunications business is a capital-intensive industry and those in the industry need sufficient funds to operate a business and updated on state-of-the-art technologies to make them competitive.
He said the President’s decision to allow four to five telecommunications companies to operate in the country impels existing service providers to further improve their services and opens the market for greater competition allowing the best providers to service the needs of the rapidly increasing number of telecommunication subscribers.
For Smart and the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company, Rosete claimed that their financial projects are based on a 5-year cycle which means that the companies have to update their systems every 5 years to conform to fast changing trends in technology.
However, the Smart official disclosed that over the past several years, the rapid change and advancement in technology reduced the financial projections of the 2 telecommunications companies to a 3-year cycle.
According to him, potential investors in the telecommunication industry will be confronted with having to hurdle the challenges of installing the basic infrastructure for their systems, among others.
Further, he underscored new players in the telecommunication industry will also be dealing with uncooperative local officials who will try to allegedly extort before allowing them to work in their areas of jurisdiction, aside from other outside factors.
He revealed that both PLDT and Smart had various experiences to cooperative and non-cooperative local officials in their different expansion projects just to reach their subscribers.
The Smart official said the company is setting up the appropriate infrastructure to meet the growing requirements for faster internet speed and uninterrupted landline and mobile phone services.
Rosete emphasized opening up the country’s telecommunications industry to competitions will serve as a challenge for the existing providers to sustain the improvement of their available services to convince their subscribers to stay connected with them instead of transferring to potential telecommunication providers that do not have the necessary experience in dealing with the peculiar terrain of the different services areas around the country.
By HENT
