Converge buys PLDT's Cavite and Batangas Cable Landing Stations

The fiber broadband provider, Converge ICT Solutions, has announced that it has acquired shares of Digital Telecommunications Phils. Inc. (DTPI) in Digitel Crossing Inc. (DCI) and Asia Netcom Philippines Corp. (ANPC) for a total of $7.5 million or about Php358.47 Million. Digitel and ANPC are subsidiaries of PLDT.

These two companies operate and maintain the EAC and C2C cable systems located in Batangas and Cavite. These cable systems provide international connectivity to the rest of the world. The East Asia Crossing (EAC) cable system 19800 km private Intra-Asia submarine cable system (linking Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore) while the City-to-City (C2C) cable system that stretches 17,000, linking Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore. The C2C network was initially constructed by SingTel in 2000 to 2002. The other major shareholder of the EAC-C2C network is Telstra.

With Converge’s recent public offering (CNVRG, Market Cap: 148.72B), it has pooled enough capital to expand its network by either constructing new fiber cable lines or buy into cable landing stations.

This move allows Converge to further tap directly into the international backbone, thereby skipping its previous relationship of merely buying bandwidth from other big providers. We sat down on a one-on-one chit-chat with Converge Founder and CEO, Dennis Uy, some 5 or 6 years ago when he revealed that they used to lease bandwidth from Globe and PLDT (around 10Gbps each at that time). This limits how much they can allocate the bandwidth to their customers due to the pricing offered by competitors where they buy their bandwidth from.

Now that Converge has more direct access to the global backbone, it can offer faster broadband speeds at more competitive price to customers as we’ve seen they do in the past years (Read: Converge vs. PLDT vs. Globe Broadband Compared). In 2016, we also published a story that PLDT was rumored to be looking into buying Converge ICT, just as it was starting to send out feelers for a possible IPO.