PLDT steps up its pace of upgrading customers to fiber in Lingayen, Pangasinan, part of the Company’s nationwide rollout to meet the increasing demand for high-speed internet access. Alongside the fiberization campaign, PLDT is also ensuring the swift cleanup of idled copper cables, helping support safer communities with seamless connectivity.
Lingayen Mayor Leopoldo N. Bataoil thanked the PLDT team for their cleanup operations that made the streets along Lingayen Poblacion safer and tidier.
“Thank you, PLDT for your immediate response to relocate your wires. Other telcos, I’m sorry but we will start cutting those spaghetti wires, to put order to our town,” said Mayor Bataoil in a Facebook post.
PLDT plans to migrate 365,000 additional copper-based customers to fiber this year. PLDT’s cleanup drive, which consists of preventive maintenance activities, complies with congressional bills as well as resolutions and ordinances from local government units (LGUs) requiring utility companies to tidy up the country’s streets of sagging cables, tilting poles, and the like.
“We intend to implement the programmed preventive maintenance on the barangay level, starting with those having high trouble index and poor line condition,” said Debbie M. Hu, PLDT-Smart Network Operations First Vice President.
Apart from Lingayen, Hu pointed out PLDT is also doing several preventive maintenance works in other areas which are triggered by requests from LGUs and netizens’ reports.
Included in preventive maintenance are the following activities: replacement, relocation or re-attachment of network access points, distribution points, local convergence points, closures, and poles; replacement, relocation, and rehabilitation of cross connect cabinets and main distribution frames; replacement and repair of manhole covers; re-tensioning and regrooming of fiber and copper cables; and recovery of idle cables.
Service improvement is also being delivered by PLDT’s fiber optic network, the country’s most extensive digital data infrastructure with a footprint that now reaches over 478,000 kilometers as of the end of the first quarter of 2021.
