SkyCable to spend P500M to expand Internet broadband coverage

Lopez-led cable operator SkyCable is spending about P500 million this year to expand its Internet broadband network coverage to still unserved and underserved areas nationwide.

The company has launched its new service called Sky Broadband, which it claims to be the fastest broadband Internet service in the country.

SkyCable vice president for marketing Rodrigo Montinola said the company uses cable lines with higher bandwidth that can carry more data.

Formerly known as ZPDee Cable Internet, Sky Broadband can provide up to 12 megabits per second (mbps), four times faster than that provided by residential digital subscriber line (DSL).

Montinola said Sky Broadband is initially available to Las Piñas, Makati, Mandaluyong, Manila, Muntinlupa, Pasig, Paranaque, Pasay, Quezon City, San Juan and Taguig residential subscribers.

The SkyCable executive added that the company is looking at expanding its Internet broadband service outside Metro Manila.

At present, the company’s Internet service has 10,000 subscribers with Internet coverage at 20 percent to 25 percent. SkyCable also has close to 500,000 subscribers nationwide, of which roughly 200,000 are in Metro Manila.

“We want to expand the market,” Montinola said, adding the company projects a significant increase in subscriber base.

As an initial offering, Sky Broadband is giving a 15-day free trial to selected SkyCable subscribers in serviceable areas.

Earlier, the company launched a low-cost international call over the Internet called SkyVoice to tap the growing overseas Filipino workers’ (OFWs) market.

Sky Voice offers the lowest IDD (international direct dial) rates in the industry at 44 centavos per minute.

Sky Voice subscribers can call relatives and friends in the US (except Alaska ), Canada , China, Hong Kong, and Mexico, Germany, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Australia, Portugal, Russia (Moscow and St. Petersburg only), Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Denmark and France.

SkyCable earlier announced it is spending around P600 million this year to convert more coverage areas from analog to digital-ready, install additional digital set-top boxes and offer new cable television services.

The amount will be sourced from internally generated funds, company officials revealed.

Of the three million households in Metro Manila, SkyCable can cover only 1.2 million. Of the 1.2 million, only 30 percent or around 400,000 subscribers are in the A,B, and C economic strata which are the target market for post paid cable TV services.

Just last year, SkyCable launched its prepaid cable tv service, whose subscriber base has reached only 10,000 so far. The relatively low rollout of the prepaid service was attributed by company officials to the fact that an area first has to be made digital-ready, a move that involves considerable investments for SkyCable.

Another reason for the still low prepaid subscriber base is that a prepaid node must consist of 500 to 1,000 households in a contiguous location.

As part of SkyCable’s move to reduce if not totally eliminate illegal cable TV connections, the company has been installing analog and digital set-top boxes.

Around 25,000 analog set-top boxes have been installed in Cebu while 50,000 digital boxes are in Metro Manila. But the cost of digital have gone down significantly, from around $80 per box prior to 2005, to $35 or $40 based on latest supplier quotations.

SkyCable plans to install around 30,000 digital set-top boxes this year. The boxes are required not only to expand its prepaid subscriber base but likewise for the higher-end SkyCable postpaid Platinum subscription which offers more channels to subscribers.

Of the 50,000 boxes in Metro Manila, around 40,000 are for Platinum subscribers while 10,000 are for prepaid.

For the non-prepaid sector, around 50 percent of Metro Manila is digital-ready. “We intend to increase this to 80 percent by the end of the year,” a company official said.