PLDT : beefing up digital infrastructure for Mindanao

Located in Davao City, these vital ICT projects are PLDT's fourth cable landing station, an Innolab or innovation laboratory, and the PLDT Group's eighth data center. These form part of PLDT's programmed capital expenditures of P48 billion for the year.

'We are putting in our collective efforts to provide Visayas and Mindanao a solid ICT foundation to help boost the regions' businesses and growing industries. It is within our short and medium term mission to accelerate the necessary investments to help build and strengthen the regions' enterprises, and enable them to become locally if not globally competitive via digital tools and solutions,' said PLDT EVP and ePLDT President and CEO Eric R. Alberto.

'These projects will help fortify our network to carry and serve the rising data traffic from our subscribers, both in the enterprise and consumer spaces,' he stressed.

The cable landing station in Davao to be fired up by the end of the month will directly link PLDT Group's network in Mindanao to all three existing international gateways in Nasugbu, Batangas; Bauang, La Union, and Daet, Camarines Norte. This will improve resiliency and latency of international data traffic going in and out of Mindanao.

This also connects Mindanao to PLDT's international managed network that has points-of-presence (POP) in Hong Kong, Singapore, US and United Kingdom, and provides a fully-managed, high bandwidth global connectivity with automatic re-routing and switching capability through different international cable routes in the event of cable faults, providing even greater resiliency in the network.

The Innolab facility, located at Poblacion in Davao City, will serve as the PLDT Group's hub for available services and technology innovations for the region's businesses and local communities. It will help showcase how these new technologies can benefit commercial operations and improve efficiencies in businesses, and will also offer educational tours to schools, beneficial especially for engineering and IT students. This showroom can also serve as a venue for local hackathon events to support local programmers and developers. PLDT currently has seven Innolab facilities across the country, including the recently opened showroom at the Makati central business district.

Like most of the data centers in the PLDT Group's network, the data center in Davao will be designed to meet global data center standards and will obtain the certifications required by industries with heavy data-security requirements like banks and financial institutions. The data center can accommodate hosting, collocation, and business continuity services for enterprises. It will also be a suitable secondary back-up location for businesses with data already housed in other data centers across the country.

The PLDT Group currently operates seven data centers in the country with the recent addition of its largest data center situated in Makati City. It targets to expand its data center facilities to 10 by 2017 with an unmatched rack capacity of over 9,000 - the largest by any provider in the country. These data centers offer various hosting, colocation and business continuity services, among others, primarily serving large enterprises, particularly banking and financial services, and business process outsourcing.

'With PLDT's overarching objective of enabling businesses nationwide to be globally competitive in an evolving digital environment, we are nurturing a digital hub in southern Philippines. We will continue to beef up our network across the country to better serve the Philippines' growing need for a stronger and more robust digital infrastructure,' concluded Alberto.