The Philippines' Globe Telecom is on track to achieve its goal of reaching 95% of the nation's cities and towns with LTE by the end of the year.
The company has been undergoing a major network expansion this year, having deployed 1,752 LTE sites nationwide in the first half, the company said. Globe now has around 12,000 LTE base stations nationwide.
Both Globe and rival PLDT made commitments to achieve 95% LTE coverage of cities and municipalities across the Philippines as part of their joint acquisition of the 700-MHz spectrum held by conglomerate San Miguel Corporation in 2016.
Globe SVP for program governance for network technology Joel Agustin said Globe has made network improvements an ongoing priority due to its customers' growing use of smartphones to access the internet and stream videos.
The company's mobile data traffic grew 40% over the course of the first half of the year to 390 petabytes.
“We are aggressively improving our existing network infrastructure by building more cell sites and base stations to enhance the quality of experience of our customers,” he said.
The company is meanwhile responding to its customers' appetite for content streaming by introducing new video services to the country, including Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Fox and Disney.