The Philippines' Globe Telecom has set its capex budget for the year ahead at $850 million to help fund its commitment of providing fast broadband to 2 million households by 2020.
The operator's board has approved the plan to keep its capex budget at roughly the same size as 2017, Rapplerreported.
The majority of the spending will be used to meet customer demand for more bandwidth-intensive content, which will in turn support revenue growth for data-related services, according to Globe CEO Ernest Cu.
This will include the deployment of massive multiple-input multiple-output (massive MIMO) technology over Globe's LTE network.
Globe has progressively increased its capex budget since 2015 and has been averaging a capex to revenue ratio of 31% over this time.
Rival PLDT has meanwhile indicated it expects to set a total capex budget for the year at a historic high of over 50 billion pesos ($997 million) as the operator seeks to future-proof its network.
Both operators are under political and consumer pressure to respond to complaints surrounding the Philippines' slow, expensive internet services compared to peers in the region.
The operators will also be facing competition under the Duterte administration's plan to introduce a third operator to break the Globe-PLDT duopoly.