DITO Telecommunity, the newest telecommunications provider in the Philippines, is accelerating the rollout of its network. In an interview, DITO Chief Administrative Officer Atty. Adel Tamano, DITO CTO Ret. Maj. Gen. Rodolfo Santiago, and ZTE Vice President Shen Hui talk about how this greenfield telecom project succeeded against the backdrop of COVID-19 restrictions and an erupting volcano in 18 months and what significance it holds for DITO.

Adel: Let's first put it in a context. In the Philippines, we have actually two major players for the better part of three decades. The lack of competition really makes service not optimal, and many Filipinos claim for enhanced competition. There was a push to have a third telco. The third telco is DITO. That's the name for our company, a Filipino?word for "here". 

Our technology partner is China Telecom. We are banking on their 5G and strong technology. Another Philippine partner is a conglomerate Udenna—that group brings the local knowledge and local network that's needed for a telco to survive the complexity and challenges of the Philippine market. So that's what we are.

Shen Hui: I think it's the largest turnkey construction project in Philippines, which is to provide the third wireless network covering the whole country. As the major supplier of the project, ZTE aims to provide the Philippines with high-quality and cost-effective 4G/5G network services. We are responsible for two regions: South Luzon and Visayas, occupying around 35% market share. The project started in October 2019. After more than one year, we have already covered 187 cities, and 41 of them have been put into commercial use.

It must be a quite big challenging project, because I didn't mention earlier some of the challenges, not the least of which was the pandemic. Give us a background of how you overcame some of those big challenges in rolling out the network.

Second, we have different types of support. During the pandemic, we really faced challenges. We have received a lot support from our customer, DITO. Also, the local government of the Philippines gave us great help. Here I would like to express my special thanks to our local employees for their great efforts during the special times. For this pandemic, we also took very strict control measures to prevent the pandemic and to ensure the employees' health and safety. 

The third part is the digital delivery. We have an end-to-end digital network deployment system. We simplify the on-site network construction process by using digital systems and intelligent tools, and implement network construction and project management in a very efficient way.

After 18 months' hard work, ZTE has completed the construction of over 1000 full turnkey sites and more than 4000 km optical cables. The speed of construction is very exceptional in the Philippine telecom history.

I think it's also important to know we have been able to build this network, have our commercial launch, and build our operations. Although we are still starting, we did it during the time of COVID-19. We did it during the time when most of our people were working remotely or from home, so that’s added some complexity to it. 

The last thing I'd like to say about this project, there's really a nation building element in it. You know we are providing jobs in this difficult time. We're providing jobs, investments, and at the same time we are addressing a big need. Because one of the things we did discover with COVID-19 was the dependency of people on working from home, studying from home, E-commerce. This also showed the weaknesses within our ICT infrastructure, which is why we're here. We want to bridge those gaps and also to bring competition.