PLDT Inc. said on Tuesday its home broadband business is “on track” to sign up one million subscribers for the year, thanks to its accelerated fiber installation and copper migration initiatives.
Manuel V. Pangilinan, who sits as the company’s chairman, said the group has installed 478,000 new fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) customers, and is “on its way” to achieving a “record-breaking” level of 1 million new customer connects this year.
“We must stay keenly focused on serving our customers, especially during this crisis—keeping families connected, entertained, and educated; enabling businesses to operate at home or in the office; ensuring healthcare delivery to those who need it—and simply being a source of strength amidst extraordinary adversity and affliction,” he said.
For the first semester, the telco recorded P14.1 billion in fiber revenues, almost double the P8.1 billion recorded the year prior.
Since last year, the company has been fast-tracking the deployment of fiber throughout the country, as it seeks to capitalize on the growing demand for internet connectivity in the home due to the pandemic.
So far, its fiber network covers 11.3 million homes passed and has over 4.8 million fiber ports. The group hopes to cover 66 percent of the country with fiber by yearend.
“We will continue to ramp up our capacity to install as demand remains high. We want to make sure that we are able to serve most, if not all, Filipinos, especially that PLDT Home is advocating brand affinity to customers through relevant content offers,” said PLDT Inc. President Alfredo S. Panlilio.
He added that the change in consumer behavior—from mobile to home broadband—will continue to persist as the Philippines still has a long way to go in solving the Covid-19 crisis.
“We see the change in customer behavior due to the pandemic, and a lot of our mobile customers who are now staying at home are utilizing their fiber-line connectivity. I think this will be the case for most Filipinos as this crisis continues for the rest of the year and until vaccination has been fully implemented,” he said.