InterAksyon.com
The online news portal of TV5
MANILA, Philippines- Besides Internet use, mobile phone companies tracked a surge in SMS and voice services in the holiday season just past, and partly credited the bucket packages with this.
According to Ramon Isberto, Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) spokesman, “SMS (short message service) is up strong,” but did not provide details beyond saying that, compared to the same period a year ago, “SMS usage was stronger than expected.”
He traced this to the “growing popularity of bucket and unli packages and to the significant investments we have made on our wireless network that improved our broadband, voice, and SMS capacity, coverage and resiliency.”
With over 48 million mobile phone users, PLDT is the largest telephone company in the country.
A similar peak trend in the holidays was observed by PLDT rival Globe Telecom Inc.
SMS traffic increased by an average of 13 percent while voice traffic increased by an average of 17 percent in the same period compared to last year’s levels.
In 2010---specifically December 24, 25 and 31---and in January 1, 2011, both rival telcos reported a slowdown in SMS traffic.
Globe reported a 6-percent decline year-on-year on December 24; 12 percent on December 25; and 9 percent on December 31 and January 1, 2011.
Smart claimed that SMS traffic went up on the same days, but admitted it was not as high as it used to be in the past years, when handsets were not yet able to connect to the Internet.
During the holidays in 2010, the telcos suspended most of the unlimited call and text offerings in a bid to prevent network congestion. The National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) prevented a repeat of this in 2011, however, and barred the telcos from suspending any of their promos during the holidays.
This---the non-suspension of the unlimited promos-- could also account for why SMS traffic was up unlike the previous year, NTC commissioner Gamaliel Cordoba said on Friday.
Smart and Globe both noticed that internet use, which includes broadband and mobile browsing, was a more popular mode for greeting people this past holiday season.
Data usage during December 24, 25, 31 and New Year’s Day increased by an average of 57 percent from the previous year, said Globe.
This trend, said Globe president Ernest Cu, “shows that our customers have responded well to our broadband and mobile data offers. We can attribute the uptake in usage to greater accessibility to the internet, which now includes the mobile phone, as well as innovative broadband and data plans, and Filipinos’ growing preference for social networking.”
Globe subscribers preferred surfing via their laptops and mobile devices to send their holiday greetings through various instant messaging and social networking sites during Christmas and New Year, he added.
Some of the SMS traffic patterns, noted some analysts, may indeed be undermined by the increasing popularity of social media tools. One analyst hazards a guess that the volume of text messages had already peaked in 2009.
Filipinos sent an estimated 1.8 billion SMS messages every day in 2009. At that time, Smart monitored nearly a billion SMS daily on December 24 and 31 while Globe handled about 800 million.
In 2010, Globe said that on a normal day it handled about 400 to 500 million text messages while Smart was processing about 800 million a day. No figures for 2011 were available as of press time.
The Philippine telecom sector has accounted for more than a tenth of the country’s GDP, boosted by the mobile segment in the past decade. Growth in mobile subscribers started to decline in 2009, however.
The telcos see the trend as a challenge, and are responding to the surging demand for bandwidth-heavy services like broadband and mobile data by a massive modernization program to increase network capacity, quality and resiliency.
For instance, the PLDT group is undertaking a two-year, P67-billion network transformation program. Globe recently announced it is spending $790 million in the next five years to upgrade its network.
