Chavit's LCS Holdings set to build PH's first common tower

LCS Holdings, Inc. of politician Luis "Chavit" Singson is now leading the local tower sharing market after it recently broke ground on the first common tower in the Philippines. 

LCS Holdings to establish the country's first shared tower in Ilocos Sur
Photo from its Facebook page

With its partner UA Withya PCL (UWC), the group inaugurated the first common tower site, which is located in Ilocos Sur.

PH's first common tower

This development came after it secured a business deal with DITO Telecommunity, formerly Mislatel, the country's third telco player. 

For the past few months, we have been working very hard in consultation with DITO as our first customer, to come up with a roll-out plan that is in-sync with their network deployment. As a result, it is our pleasure to announce the ground breaking of our inaugural Common Tower in Ilocos Sur to earmark the start of LCS’ effort to help this nation and the Government in fulfilling our vision to improve the nation’s mobile coverage, Singson said. 

After the first site in Ilocos Sur, the group was looking to ramp up deployment of shared infrastructure to regional and rural areas, Singson added. 

We’re proud to be the first customer of LCS. It’s a first strong step in the direction of providing faster, more affordable, and most importantly, more secure internet connectivity for all Filipinos, across all the islands of the Philippines, DITO Telecommunity Chief Administrative Officer Adel Tamano said. 

Dominant carriers Globe Telecom and PLDT had also tapped other tower builders for the same agreement. 

Currently, the Philippines has only less than 20,000 towers—not enough to provide quality telecommunications services to more than 100 million Filipinos. The government earlier said the telco industry has to have at least 50,000 cell sites.