The Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) is completing three major ICT projects in Mindanao next month to enhance the region’s digital infrastructure and support economic growth.
Located in Davao City, the ICT projects include PLDT’s fourth cable landing station, an innovation laboratory (Innolab) and the telco’s eighth data center – all part of its P48 billion capital expenditure for 2016.
The Davao cable landing station, to be fired up end of September, will link the PLDT Group’s network in Mindanao directly to three existing international gateways in Nasugbu, Batangas; Bauang, La Union and Daet, Camarines Norte, improving international data traffic in and out of Mindanao.
The landing station will also connect Mindanao to PLDT’s international managed network with points-of-presence (POP) in Hong Kong, Singapore, US and United Kingdom.
On the other hand, the Innolab facility in Poblacion, Davao City, will serve as the PLDT Group’s hub for services and technology innovation for businesses and local communities in the region.
Innolab will showcase new technologies to benefit commercial operations and efficiency, offer educational tours to schools for engineering and IT students, serve as a venue for local hackathon events supporting local programmers and developers.
PLDT currently has seven Innolab facilities across the country, including the recently opened showroom at the Makati central business district.
For its part, the new Davao data center will be designed to meet global data center standards and accommodate hosting, collocation and business continuity services for enterprises.
At the same time, it can serve as a secondary back-up location for businesses with data already housed in other data centers across the country.
Todate, PLDT operates seven data centers in the country with the recent addition of its largest data center situated in Makati City.
The telco targets to expand its data center facilities to 10 by 2017 with total rack capacity of over 9,000 – the largest by any provider in the country.
These data centers serve large enterprises, particularly banking and financial services and business process outsourcing.
