Globe open to deal with Mislatel
Credit to Author: LISBET K. ESMAEL| Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2019 16:20:07 +0000
New major player Mislatel may see its network woes ease as Globe Telecom signaled openness to share its cell sites.
The latest entrant to the national telecommunications market may have “immediate access” to Globe’s towers, its legal counsel Froilan Castelo told The Manila Times.
“We are not yet in discussion with Mislatel but we are open to discussion with them including the possibility of tower-sharing with them,” the Ayala-led telecommunications company (telco) official said Monday.
Mislatel lawyer Adel Tamano has urged industry players to partner with them to hasten the deployment of its telco services. Converge ICT Solutions was the first to express willingness to share its existing infrastructure with the new major operator.
While Globe boasts more than 8,000 cell sites across the Philippines, it has long acknowledged the need to increase these to address Filipinos’ growing demand for data. In the first nine months of last year, the telco saw its mobile data traffic surge by 49 percent to 641 petabytes from the 430 petabytes recorded in the same period in 2017.
PLDT and Globe have said that red tape in securing permits for building towers has been the major hurdle. Since the Philippines only has only over 16,000 towers, the government wants to open the market to tower companies (towercos).
Globe is forming its own towerco GTowers Inc., which received a go signal from the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) in August 2018. Yoly Crisanto, head of corporate communications at
Globe, said last week the group was in talks with “independent and international towercos” to join its new business.
Globe started the week with its shares falling by P12 to close at P1,860 apiece on Monday.
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