Let Mr. Jesus “Boboy” C. Romero answer this question. As the company’s Chief Operations Officer (COO), he’s got the brilliant mind to explain the whys and the hows behind Converge’s rapid climb to success.
In a recent interview on James Deakin’s “Tito’Clock” weekly show on Facebook and YouTube, Mr. Romero shared three Fun Fiber Facts on why its broadband service is in a class of its own. Here’s what he had to say:
- Fiber technology, among the different types of broadband, is the best in class in the basics - Speed, quality, and capacity
Fiber is equipped with a speed that surpasses copper technology, with Fiber-to-the-home lines’ coming in at 1 Gigabit per second. Moreover, these offered speeds are symmetric, giving the same speeds for upload and download.
“With copper technology – whether DSL or coaxial - the upload is a whole lot slower than the download, and not suited for work-from-home that we’ve been doing a lot these days,” noted Romero.
Mr. Romero added that fiber carries data through light. That being said, it’s a lot more immune to interference, for example; electromagnetic surge. On top of that, fiber is more resilient to damage, like corrosion. For fiber, capacity is king – the fiber optic subsea cables which telcos and ISPs lay down can run up to 24 terabits per second. Talk about a revolution, seeing that just over a decade ago, many Filipino internet users are struggling to connect using kilobytes of data. To put things into perspective, a single terabyte consists of roughly 1-billion kilobytes, that’s 1 plus 9 zeros in figures.
- Converge paved the way for fiber scale-up in the industry.
With the pandemic exposing the need for high-capacity and high speed internet that wireless broadband can’t meet, Converge has already launched its aggressive expansion plans and the pandemic further accelerated the demand for fiber internet.
“When we started, fiber didn’t exist on the scale that it does now. We were the first to offer unlimited bandwidth – no data caps through fiber. After this, the industry followed suit,” said Romero.
Along with removing the data caps and offering users symmetric speeds, Converge was in no short supply of innovation. Today, it offers the Time of Day Fiber broadband plans. This allows customers to get doubled speeds at the time of the day they need it most. Best part about this is that the Converge Time of Day Fiber broadband plans remain unrivalled in the industry.
“There is that innovation in Converge that comes with being new,” he noted.
- Converge’s fiber network is the youngest and only one that uses pure end-to-end fiber in PH.
Since it started to build its own network in 2016, Converge’s total fiber assets – which now run to nearly 500,000 kilometers – is the newest among the telco players, and the only one that uses pure fiber from its backbone to its last mile network.
“We built this network at a cost lower than anybody else because we built it by ourselves – not outsourced which is the norm in the industry. We have a company which builds the infrastructure, allowing us to control the quality. As a new player, we have no legacy technology, which means whatever technology we put into the infrastructure is the latest,” the chief operations officer said.
