DICT eyes broadband expansion before SoNA

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) aims to complete the National Broadband Program (NBP) before President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. holds his fourth State of the Nation Address (SoNA) in July. 

“We are ahead of schedule. Phase 2 and 3 are expected to be deployed this year before SoNA; it should be done,” Information and Communications Technology Secretary Ivan John Uy said in an interview at the induction of new officers of the Economic Journalists Association of the Philippines last Friday.  

To accelerate the remaining phases, DICT secured a $288 million loan from the World Bank to fund Phases 4 and 5. Uy said the agency pursued external financing after determining that relying solely on the General Appropriations Act (GAA) would delay completion until 2030.  

“When we started here, we saw that if we rely on the GAA to put the National Broadband, it might take us until 2030 to complete but we want to speed it up. Instead of relying on the GAA, we formulated a plan to speed it up by applying for a loan with the World Bank which was granted, $288 million,” Uy explained.  

Parallel work

With the additional funding, DICT can implement the remaining phases in parallel, ensuring completion before the administration’s term ends. “It can go in parallel now and we can deploy that before our term ends,” Uy added.  

DICT has completed the first phase of the NBP, a 1,245-kilometer fiber backbone from Laoag, Ilocos Norte, to Quezon City with 28 nodes. It has an initial 600 gigabit-per-second capacity to serve the government, 14 provinces, and two national data centers.  

Phases 2 and 3 will extend the network to southern Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, connecting submarine cables from abroad to support the country’s broadband infrastructure.