PLDT internet services back to normal

MANILA, Philippines — Telco giant PLDT Inc. has restored its broadband services back to normal following the downtime it suffered on Monday. 

PLDT yesterday restored its internet services after losing some of its bandwidth capacity due to problems faced by the Asia Submarine Express (ASE).

“The Asia Submarine Express caused the loss of broadband bandwidth on Monday. We had to reroute. The service should be back to normal now,” PLDT president and CEO Alfredo Panlilio told The STAR.

The ASE runs for 8,148 kilometers across Asia, constructed by a consortium of Asian operators, including PLDT. The submarine cable system consists of six fiber pairs linking Japan with Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.

The consortium spent $430 million to put up the ASE, of which PLDT invested about $55 million. The ASE can transmit up to 51 terabits of data per second, making the subsea cable link one of the highest capacities in Asia-Pacific.

Moving forward, Panlilio said PLDT wants to fix the Asia America Gateway (AAG) to boost its international capacity further.

According to Panlilio, the consortium behind AAG wants to fix the submarine cable system, but faces challenges in doing the repair due to territorial tensions in the area.

“We continue to add as you know. Problem is another subsea cable, Asia America Gateway, that is supposed to augment our capacity has been down for a year. The issue is we cannot repair it because of geopolitical issues,” Panlilio said.

The AAG spans about 20,000 kilometers and transmits data to and from the United States, Brunei Darussalam, Guam, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. All in all, the AAG required an investment of $560 million to develop and build the subsea cable.

PLDT plans to deliver new cable systems that will link Asia and North America to persuade tech giants like Amazon, Google and Meta to set up data facilities here in the Philippines. Apart from this, the telco giant wants to raise its data capacity to improve its broadband services.

On Monday, PLDT announced that one of its submarine cable partners lost some of its bandwidth capacity, slowing down the internet speed of its subscribers.

The Pangilinan-led telco yesterday reported that the submarine cable partner supplied additional capacity to restore browser experience to normal.