Globe: Building more cell sites to lower energy consumption

FILE: High-rise buildings in 32nd Street, Bonifacio Global CityB, Metro Manila, Philippines. From left to right: F1 City Center Tower, Globe Telecom Tower, TKS Tower, NAC and ECO Accralaw-Ascendas Towers. (Photo By Hans Olav Lien – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)

MANILA — Globe Telecom has urged the government to implement policies to ease restrictions for building cell sites across the country and lower the energy consumption of telecommunication firms and consumers.

“We understand that site density is a hard problem to solve and is not entirely within our control. But this is a message from a public policy perspective that we are constantly giving our government to allow us to build more cell sites faster to the same degree as Vietnam who has 70,000 towers already as compared to the Philippines’ barely 23,000,” Globe chief technology and information officer Gil Genio said during the Globe Power Summit 2019 held in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig on Friday.

Genio said building more cell sites would enable telco firms, as well as their customers to save on power consumption.

“The reality in the Philippines is that the more dense site networks we have, the less power our cell sites will consume. A more dense cell site network allows the telecom operators, as well as individual consumers,  to lower overall power consumption,” he said.

Globe uses 360 megawatts per hour (MWh) of electricity, equivalent to PHP3.5 billion every year.

For the past three years, Globe’s network has been consuming 9 million liters of diesel fuel annually, amounting to PHP348 million.

“Climate change is one of the greatest global challenges the world has ever faced. The positive economic impact of us in telecom is undeniable — from connectivity to contribution to GDP (gross domestic product) and employment. But the downside is the energy consumption that powers our developments,” Genio said.

Globe has long lamented the tedious process in securing permits for the building of cell sites in the country. It estimates that it takes eight months for a telco to have 25 permits before it can build a single cell tower.

Meanwhile, the Department of Information and Communications Technology is set to finalize within the year its policy on allowing the sharing of cell sites and other communication infrastructures for telcos to improve the delivery of their services.

The department assured that it will implement measures to expedite the granting of permits for the construction of cell towers across the country.