PLDT Digicon: A Sustainable Smart City Starts at the Infrastructure Layer

Summary Bullets:

A. Amir

• A sustainable smart city should consider the deployment goals, but also the underlying infrastructure.

• PLDT checks most boxes in the infrastructure and technology layers as well as in the other ICT domains but it could consider further expanding its capabilities in the professional services and partner ecosystem.

PLDT’s Sustainable Smart City Initiatives

In the Philippine Digital Convention (Digicon) 2021, PLDT shared its initiatives and capabilities in driving sustainable smart city adoption and helping industries to achieve goals in the sustainability three pillars: economic, environmental, and social. On the application layer, PLDT offers a range of smart city solutions across verticals in line with the sustainable smart city goals. This includes remote learning in education, COVID response in healthcare, and emergency response in public safety. As an ICT provider, PLDT also continues to build the underlying infrastructure to enhance existing applications and enable new sustainable smart city solutions. It has 15 subsea cables including Jupiter, Asia Direct, and Apricot, and 12 point-of-presence (PoPs) across the world to offer reliable global interconnections. Domestically, it has over 540,000km of fiber providing high-speed connectivity nationwide as well as more than 4,000 5G base stations covering major Philippines cities. Besides connectivity, PLDT has 10 interconnected data centers that deliver 9,000 racks and 27 MW of power to host enterprises applications and workloads. Further, in line with its sustainability agenda, it is working to achieve 1.4 power usage effectiveness (PUE) for its facilities, source at least 20% of its data centers’ power consumption from renewable energy, and obtain Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) and ISO 50001 certifications.