PLDT remains undisputed fastest internet in the Philippines

PLDT has achieved a five-peat win at the Ookla® Speedtest Awards™ 2022 -- a first for PLDT, and for the Philippines.  

 

Global benchmarking company Ookla® announced that PLDT, the country’s largest digital services provider, achieved a top speed score of 86.52 in 2022, affirming the telco’s dominance and consistent performance in delivering the country’s fastest Internet speeds for the fifth consecutive year. 

 

PLDT has consistently dominated the Ookla® Speedtest Awards™ for five consecutive years as a result of the telco giant’s aggressive network expansion and drive to lift the quality of customer experience. 

PLDT President and CEO Alfredo S. Panlilio leads a toast to their Fastest Internet 5 Years In A Row award with (L-R): PLDT Senior Vice President - Head of Consumer Sales Group Alex O. Caeg, First Vice President - Head of Enterprise and International Business Groups Albert Mitchell L. Locsin, Ookla CTO Luke Deryckx, PLDT Senior Vice President - Head of Home Business Group Jeremiah M. de la Cruz, PLDT and Smart Network Head Roderick Santiago, and Ookla Senior Vice President and Global Head of Sales and Enterprise Services Kuljeet Randhawa.

 

 

The PLDT Group has been supporting the country’s digitalization by bringing the benefits of connectivity and other digital services to more areas in the Philippines. In 2022, PLDT recorded a total of 6.08 million fiber-powered ports, covering around 17,700 barangays across the country. 

 

“PLDT’s commitment is to help build and empower the nation by setting the bar high in providing world-class digital services for Filipinos,” said PLDT President and CEO Alfredo S. Panlilio. “For the past five years, PLDT has made big strides to elevate our customers’ experience by delivering the best fixed network services. We intend to keep this momentum and to go above and beyond in ensuring that our customers get the best digital experience wherever they need it – at home, school, or the office.”

PLDT remains undisputed fastest internet in the Philippines, winning the Ookla Speedtest Awards for five years in a row. In photo are (L-R): PLDT Senior Vice President - Head of Home Business Group Jeremiah M. de la Cruz, Ookla Chief Technology Officer Luke Deryckx, PLDT President and CEO Alfredo S. Panlilio, PLDT First Vice President - Head of Enterprise and International Business Groups Albert Mitchell L. Locsin, PLDT and Smart Network Head Roderick Santiago and Ookla Senior Vice President and Global Head of Sales and Enterprise Services Kuljeet Randhawa.

  

PLDT remains the only telco in the Philippines that can deliver the fastest fiber-optic speeds of up to 10 Gbps, which was made available to the public as early as 2021. This groundbreaking move has placed the Philippines alongside first-world nations in terms of ultra-fast internet speeds including South Korea, Japan, Norway, Italy, New Zealand, and USA. 

 

As of end-2022, PLDT achieved an all-time high number of home broadband customers by adding 1.1 million new fiber subscribers, capturing 59% of fiber customer industry growth for 2022. This brought PLDT Home’s total fiber subscribers to 2.9 million.

PLDT Home continues to be the trusted telco provider of Filipinos that delivers the fastest internet and future-ready innovations in their homes. Leading innovations for the home broadband segment in 2022, PLDT Home boosted its efforts to give customers the best digital experience at home by increasing the speeds of all its Fiber plans up to two times faster than previous speeds. 

 

The PLDT Group, through its ICT subsidiary ePLDT, also provides data center, multi-cloud and cybersecurity solutions that enable the digital transformation of large companies, Micros, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) to help drive the country’s inclusive economic growth. Leveraging on PLDT’s advance infrastructure, ePLDT is the country’s leading provider of data center and multi-cloud managed service offerings.

 

The Most Coveted Ookla Speedtest Award

 

PLDT is the only telco in the Philippines that has ever achieved a five-peat for the highest award from Ookla. According to Ookla, only a handful of internet service providers have won the prestigious award for five consecutive years worldwide. In Southeast Asia, only PLDT as the leading telco in the Philippines has this honor, alongside Singapore’s ViewQWest. 

 

Ookla’s Chief Technology Officer, Luke Deryckx, affirms PLDT’s superior network performance for the past five years. He says, “With over 18 million consumer-initiated tests taken daily and billions of data points gathered, the Ookla data paints a clear picture of the performance, quality, and availability of virtually every network in the world. We are proud to recognize PLDT’s hard work in providing the fastest Internet experience in the Philippines and celebrate their achievements in superior network performance over the last 5 years.” 

 

With the consistent wins at the Ookla® Speedtest Awards, PLDT also clocked the top speeds in major areas in the Philippines and bested all other major telco providers in 2022 including Pasig City, Cagayan de Oro, Baguio City, amongst others.

 

All these achievements are powered by PLDT’s widest fiber network in the country which now spans 1.1 million kilometers, extending its reach to 17.2 million homes passed, in 68% of the country’s cities and municipalities. 

 

For more information about PLDT’s Ookla Speedtest Awards, visit www.pldt.com.

PLDT and its wireless subsidiary Smart Communications, Inc. (Smart) are the country’s fastest fixed and mobile networks for 2018

PLDT and its wireless subsidiary Smart Communications, Inc. (Smart) are the country’s fastest fixed and mobile networks for 2018, according to Ookla, the global leader in internet testing and analysis.

In its latest report, which covers Q3-Q4 2018, Smart achieved a Speed Score TM of 15.57, with average download speeds of 17.86 Mbps and average upload speeds of 8.61 Mbps, based on 2,186,540 user-initiated tests taken with Speedtest® on LTE-capable devices in the Philippines.

On the other hand, PLDT achieved a Speed Score of 18.57, with top download speeds of 52.28 Mbps and top upload speeds of 55.95 Mbps. The fixed network award is based on 27,221,777 customer-initiated Speedtest nationwide for the same period.

The Speed Score is a measure that takes into account both upload and download speeds.

“We are pleased to award Smart with the award for Fastest Mobile Network and PLDT for the award for Fastest Fixed Network in the Philippines. This recognition is testament to their exceptional performance in Q3-Q4 based on Ookla's rigorous analysis of consumer-initiated tests taken with Speedtest," said Jamie Steven, Executive Vice President at Ookla.

These latest figures are improvements from the Q1-Q2 scores, when Smart posted a Speed Score of 14.98 and PLDT achieved a speed score of 17.31.

“This award is proof that our continued investments in our network to improve the mobile internet experience of our customers across the country are paying off,” said Mario G. Tamayo, PLDT and Smart senior vice president for Network Planning and Engineering.


“Improved connectivity has helped Filipinos keep abreast with ever-evolving times, empowering individuals, businesses and government,” Tamayo added. “In addition to our network investments, we have also undertaken LTE migration efforts to assist customers in upgrading to LTE through SIM replacement programs and by partnering with device manufacturers in making LTE devices more accessible,” Tamayo said.

PLDT, Smart ahead in key cities

Drilling down, initial data included in Ookla’s country reports showed Smart still posting big leads in key cities like Quezon City, Makati and Manila, for example, while PLDT is still way ahead in Quezon City, Pasig and Manila.

In Quezon City, for example, Smart posted a Speed Score of 23.09, more than twice that of the competing network. This reflects the results of the major network upgrade activities that Smart recently undertook in the city, including the activation of LTE-Advanced and carrier aggregation.

For mobile, Speed Score incorporates a measure of each provider’s download and upload speed to rank network speed performance. Tests used to calculate the Speed Score exclusively come from ‘modern devices’, which are devices capable of connecting to the market’s fastest, generally available technology.

For fixed, Ookla assesses the best network speeds attained across a given network, accounting for tests that are taken on various Speedtest applications that connect to a fixed network, including tests taken on mobile phones over a Wi-Fi connection. Each top carrier accounts for at least 3% of the sample size in the geographic area.

Investment in network transformation

The awards come as PLDT and Smart ramp up their integrated fixed and wireless network expansion. PLDT has committed historic levels of resources to support network transformation which is estimated to amount to US$ 5 billion from 2016 to 2020. In 2018, capital expenditures were at P58 billion.

Alongside Smart’s ramped-up Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) roll out, PLDT is also aggressively rolling out its fiber broadband service, which also supports the stepped-up deployment of the mobile network by providing high-capacity links for cellular base stations.



To date, Smart has also already fulfilled its commitment to the National Telecommunications Commission to cover at least 90 percent of cities and municipalities to address the growing demand for broadband infrastructure and internet access within three years from the grant of the use of frequencies by the NTC in 2016.

Meanwhile, PLDT operates the country’s most extensive fiber infrastructure at 221,000 km and its fiber coverage has now reached 5.75 million homes as of end of the 3rd quarter of 2018, while its total capacity of 2.25 million ports has more than doubled from end of 2017.