By Azer N. Parrocha
MANILA, Dec 8 (PNA) — Globe Telecom Inc. (Globe) on Monday said that it expects the firing up of cell sites in Gigoso, Giporlos in Eastern Samar covered by the facility within the day.
In a statement, the Ayala-led telco said that its network operations team has began working on the restoration of a base station controller located in Gigoso, Giporlos.
The base station controller in Gigoso provides mobile coverage for the municipalities of Borongan, Can-avid, Dolores, Eduard, Gamay, Hernani, Canceledes, Sulat, Julian, Lapinig, Lloren, Luis, Mabuta, McArthur, Maydolong, Mapanas, Oras, Salcedo, San Policarpio, Sulat, Taft, Balangkayan and Giporlos, all in Eastern Samar.
Although the network operations did not suffer any catastrophic outages from typhoon “Ruby”, most service disruptions were due to outages of commercial power and misalignment of antennas following strong winds brought by the typhoon.
Globe Senior Vice President for Corporate Communications Yoly Crisanto said that as soon as the Gigoso base station becomes operational, the company expects to restore 34 cell sites within Eastern Samar starting Monday.
“Expect some cell sites to be fired up within 24-hours although the complete restoration of all the 34 sites may take up to 72-hours since some of sites remain inaccessible due to landslides, floods and debris caused by the typhoon,” Crisanto said.
She meanwhile assured its customers that Globe is exerting all means possible to immediately restore telecommunication services in areas adversely affected by Ruby.
To date, Globe has restored around 32 percent of cell sites affected by the typhoon back to operation. (PNA)