Globe Telecom in the Philippines announced today it has completed a $700 million network modernisation initiative, which included the rollout of 4,300 LTE cell sites.

Globe, the country’s second largest mobile player with a 38 per cent market share, expanded its LTE TDD/FDD network to keep up with the growing data requirements of its customers, who are increasingly moving to data-capable devices, said Globe president and CEO Ernest Cu.

Cu said its two-pronged network expansion increases the reliability and speed of its mobile internet service. He noted the company will need to continue to upgrade its network infrastructure to keep up with the growing popularity of smartphones.

Its capex this year is forecast to remain at last year’s level of $650 million.

A study by OpenSignal, which tracks mobile coverage and metrics via crowdsourcing, found that Globe’s latency averaged 93.3 milliseconds compared with its main competitor’s (Smart) average latency of 185.4 ms.

“Latency — the time it takes for a server to acknowledge a request from a device — has a major impact on how fast a network feels, irrespective of the download/upload speed. It has a big impact on video streaming and VoIP in particular,” OpenSignal said.

Globe demonstrated proof-of-concept trials in September of LTE carrier aggregation and LTE Broadcast, which is based on evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) technology.