Wednesday, October 10, 2007 SMART supports Zamboanga City’s La Hermosa Festival
SMART Communications Inc. (Smart), the Philippines’ leading wireless services provider, recently inked an agreement with the local government of Zamboanga City to be the exclusive telco partner of the city’s La Hermosa Festival to culminate on Friday.
The festival, popularly known as Fiesta Pilar, celebrates the locals’ devotion to Nuestra Señora La Virgen del Pilar, the patron of Zamboanga City and its unifying cultural and historical symbol.
Smart’s partnership with the festival organizers highlights the mobile operator's intent to contribute to Zamboanga City’s development and to Mindanao, in general, with cutting-edge communication and information technology infrastructure to benefit residents and visitors alike.
Recently, Smart had announced that it became the first to connect the far-flung, off-grid island provinces of Sulu, Basilan, and Tawi-tawi to the Mindanao mainland via terrestrial microwave radio, making available in these areas new services such as 3G cellular services and high-speed broadband Internet.
In July of this year, Smart installed on six strategic mountain-top areas relay stations that form the backbone of a communications highway connecting the three provinces to the cellular operator’s base station in Zamboanga City via SDH microwave radio. A terrestrial link, such as SDH microwave radio system, provides a more stable, reliable, and efficient wireless connection than via satellite (VSAT), which had previously been used to link these provinces.
These enhancements of its Mindanao coverage will further bolster Smart’s wireless leadership in the country, and accelerate the introduction of innovative broadband access and other wireless services to the country’s most remote and rural areas.
“The enhancement of our cellular and broadband networks in Sulu, Basilan, and Tawi Tawi represents a considerable investment of time, effort, and resources. We are proud of our engineers who designed and implemented this program. This is part of our continuing commitment to expand and fortify our network infrastructure all over the country and offer convergent communications services that are relevant to Filipinos here and overseas,” says Napoleon L. Nazareno, Smart president and chief executive officer. (Press release)
