14 SEP 2026 — The Philippines' three largest fixed and mobile operators have committed more than US$2.2 billion of capital spending for 2026. They are doing it in the first full year of a law written to let competitors build networks without asking any of them for permission.
Incumbents rarely spend heavily into a market that has just been opened, and the Konektadong Pinoy Act opened this one at every layer of the network at once. That tension is how to read the number.
Who is spending what
PLDT has committed roughly PHP55 billion. Globe Telecom has guided to below PHP59.4 billion. Converge ICT plans PHP17 billion to PHP20 billion. Together that is the US$2.2 billion figure; including DITO, the newest mobile entrant, the market total runs to somewhere between US$2.4 billion and US$2.45 billion.
The stated destinations are the rollout of the Konektadong Pinoy Act and the expansion of the National Fibre Backbone. Operators have also floated a US$500 million nationwide submarine cable system, and Globe has backed a unified policy for shared underground conduits along national roads — a boring proposal that would remove one of the most expensive and slowest parts of building anything in a Philippine city.
No prior-year comparison was published alongside the announcement, which limits what can be said about it. Whether this is an increase, a plateau or a managed decline is not something the figure alone can tell you.
What the law actually changed
Republic Act 12234 removes the requirement that a data transmission provider hold a legislative franchise — an act of Congress — before it can operate. In its place the National Telecommunications Commission has issued a registration and authorisation framework, Memorandum Circular No. 002-02-2026, covering four segments: the international gateway, the core or backbone network, the middle mile and the last mile.
The franchise requirement was the moat. It made entry a political process with a multi-year timeline, and it is the single clearest explanation for why a country of 110 million people has had three serious players. Replacing it with registration is a structural change, not a subsidy or a target.
The stated ambitions attached to it are large. The framework is aimed at connecting 10,875 underserved barangays and at cutting connectivity costs by 30 to 50 per cent by the end of the current presidential term in 2028. Separately, the information and communications technology secretary, Henry Aguda, has said the department is aiming for at least a 40 per cent drop in internet costs. Those are two different figures from two different sources, and neither is a commitment anybody can be held to.
Why incumbents spend when a market opens
The intuitive reading — that capex at this level signals confidence — is probably the wrong one. Spending into a liberalising market is more often defensive than optimistic.
Fixed networks are won by whoever passes a household first. Once a home is connected, the cost of switching it is somebody else's capital plus an installation appointment, and churn falls sharply. An incumbent with a year's notice that entry barriers are dropping has one obvious move, which is to build to the addressable footprint before anybody else can.
The submarine cable and shared-conduit proposals fit the same reading. Both are shared infrastructure that is more efficient built once, and both, built by incumbents, become facilities a new entrant has to buy access to rather than assets it can bypass. Open access at the licence layer does not by itself produce open access at the duct.
What has to happen for prices to fall
Registration is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. A new operator still needs local permits, rights of way, pole and duct access, backhaul and spectrum where mobile is involved, and every one of those is negotiated with someone who has already been there for twenty years.
The interconnection terms are where this will be decided. If an entrant can reach the backbone and the international gateway on published, non-discriminatory terms, entry is a financing problem. If those terms are commercially negotiated case by case, the franchise moat has been replaced by a slower and less visible one.
The NTC has separately proposed minimum service standards — 50 Mbps in both directions, latency under 30 milliseconds, packet loss below one per cent, jitter under 20 milliseconds and uptime above 99 per cent. Against a current median download of about 46.7 Mbps, those standards would bind rather than describe, which is unusual and makes them worth watching.
The regional context
The Philippines chairs ASEAN in 2026 and has put digital integration at the centre of that term, so the domestic reform and the regional agenda are being run by the same government at the same time. Its national connectivity plan leans on nearby ASEAN data centres rather than assuming everything is built onshore.
That accommodates geography sensibly. An archipelago of more than 7,000 islands has a harder backbone problem than any of its neighbours, which makes the submarine cable proposal the most consequential item on the operators' list. Domestic subsea capacity is what turns a set of island markets into one market, and private capital has historically underfunded it because the returns are slow and regional rather than local.
What to watch
Count the registrations the NTC actually grants, and note who receives them. Foreign operators have signalled interest, and the first well-funded entrant will say more about whether the barrier has fallen than any amount of framework detail.
Then look for published interconnection and duct-access terms. If they do not appear, assume they are being negotiated.
Next year's capital guidance settles the question the current figure cannot. A second year at this level would suggest a build-out; a sharp fall once the footprint is claimed would suggest the spending was about defending it.
