PLDT preparing for blended learning scheme in education

MANILA, Philippines — Telecommunications giant PLDT Inc. is preparing its network to support the expected surge in demand with the implementation of the blended learning scheme in the education sector.

PLDT chief financial officer Anabelle Lim-Chua in an interview with “The Chiefs” on One News/TV5 on Wednesday night said the company is getting ready for the blended learning approach both on the connectivity side as well as in trying to provide learning management systems.

“We’re trying to arrange for capturing all of these locally so there are packages already that our enterprise group have offered to various schools to be able to serve that requirement,” Chua said.

“But it also goes behind that. You have the schools as a customer but you also have the students, teachers all over. So at the moment, we do cover 96 percent of our population. But of course the level of requirements differs from area to area so we continue to expand our network and to provide more capacity as we expect the demand for data will continue to surge,” she said.

Chua said PLDT, through its enterprise group, is in close coordination with the government as well as public and private schools to discuss their requirements in line with the upcoming distance and online learning scheme.

“So we’re starting to enter into arrangements with some of these schools like UST, Ateneo, etc. to be able to serve their requirements specifically. But there is also a broader scale requirement that is being discussed with the Department of Education (DepEd),” Chua said.

The DepEd plans to implement an alternative learning program in the country by August as President Duterte has stated that face-to-face classes would not be allowed until a vaccine for COVID-19 becomes available.

“For us, we’ve really seen the necessity of our service for people because they’re at home, they’re working from home. So we are committed to do whatever we can to serve. There are adjustments that everybody has to make given that this pandemic is really something that nobody expected to happen in such a big way,” Chua said.

“In PLDT, we’ve been talking about digital transformation. It (the pandemic) put extreme pressure to make it happen quicker. For us, we continue to view that there is demand for connectivity, we continue to invest, we continue to push that we be able to provide service across the consumers who are using the mobile phone, people who are home who need a fiber connection, to enterprises, even to our OFW communities,” she said.

Chua said PLDT is continuing its network investment to ensure it is in good quality and it can serve the growing data demand.

PLDT earlier said that its original capex guidance for the year of P83 billion would probably be pared down, with anywhere between 20 percent to 25 percent of the budget deferred, following the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its network rollout.