MANILA, The Philippines—Smart Communications, one of the Philippines’ biggest mobile-phone operators, recently reported that its network would be able to handle a 10-million subscriber capacity this year.
Smart signed late last year a US$200 million GSM expansion contract with Nokia.
The company announced that the number of short message service text messages passing through its network by end of the 2001 increased threefold, reaching 240 million text messages daily from 92 million during the same period last year.
This increase was partly attributed to the doubling of its network capacity between 2000 and 2001 from 4 million subscribers to 8 million, according to Smart.
Last year, Smart installed a total of 12 GSM switches, six of which are in Metro Manila, while the rest are in the provinces—two each in Cebu and in Cagayan de Oro; and one each in La Union, Quezon and Tarlac.
Smart also upgraded three of its older switches in Metro Manila to higher capacity DX200i switches, and its SMS servers, which are responsible for processing text messages last year.
