Globe expects 50% of data traffic to come from LTE network by year- end

Amid steady expansion of the company’s LTE coverage and capacities to improve customers’ mobile experience, Globe Telecom expects around 50% of its mobile data traffic to come from LTE network by the end of the year.

Mobile data traffic in the first six months of the year soared 85% to 280 petabytes (PB) from 151 PB in the first six months of last year amid steady increase in smartphone penetration, currently estimated at around 67% of total mobile subscribers.

Currently, about 43% of the company’s data traffic comes from its LTE network amid the company’s aggressive deployment of LTE sites following its commitment to improve the mobile internet experience in the country, said Joel Agustin, Globe Senior Vice President for Program Governance, Network Technical Group.

To date, Globe has close to 5,000 LTE sites all over the country, utilizing the 700 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2600 MHz frequencies, with a target to increasing this further by more than 600 sites by the end of the year, he said.

“Over the years, Globe has been continuously upgrading its network infrastructure and capacities to make us future-ready in anticipation of our customers’ bandwidth requirement. As our LTE network is steadily becoming more and more pervasive, more and more people transacting in LTE will have improve mobile data experience compared to 3G,” Agustin said.

According to him, a significant number of Globe customers are on LTE devices but are using 3G SIMs while many others are using LTE SIMs but are on 3G devices.  “We want to encourage our customers especially those that are already using LTE devices to migrate to the LTE network by switching to a LTE SIM for better mobile experience,” he added. Since January this year, Globe has already migrated around 900,000 of customers using LTE devices but were still using a 3G SIM, he said. 

He emphasized that migration to LTE network spells a big difference in terms of customer experience as the network provides superior streaming of multi-media content even as they are on the go. The company’s LTE sites are located mostly in Metro Manila and other highly-populated areas, where majority of customers using LTE-based handsets are located.