Globe Telecom wants the Philippines to bury its internet cables — and it wants one national rulebook for doing it. The company has submitted a proposal for a coordinated national framework on underground conduit systems, the protected pipes that carry fiber-optic cables beneath roads, after recording more than 14,000 fiber cut incidents in 2025. The proposal was filed through the Digital Infrastructure sector of the Private Sector Advisory Council (PSAC), the business group that advises the President, the Manila Times reported.
Why Globe wants fiber underground
Fiber cuts are one of the biggest causes of internet outages in the country. When a cable is sliced by road works, damaged in a typhoon, or stolen for scrap, entire neighborhoods and business districts can lose their connection until repair crews splice the line back together.
Globe says the more than 14,000 incidents it logged in 2025 came from natural disasters, accidents, and theft, according to Developing Telecoms. The company has already completed over 1,500 kilometers of underground fiber facilities on its own, and says those buried segments have seen significantly fewer cuts than overhead lines in the same areas.
The problem is that burying cables today means dealing with rules that change from one city or municipality to the next. Local government units issue their own permits and set their own conditions, which makes underground deployment slow, expensive, and inconsistent.
What the proposal asks for
Globe's submission calls on the government to treat underground conduits as shared national infrastructure. The key requests are:
- A National Underground Conduits Master Plan covering planning, construction, and management nationwide
- Common technical standards so conduits are built the same way everywhere
- A designated lead agency to oversee deployment and coordinate government departments
- Clear rules on maintenance responsibility and on shared use of the conduits by different operators
The Philippine Chamber of Telecommunications Operators (PCTO) supports the push. Froi Castelo, Globe's general counsel and concurrently PCTO president, said a common policy for shared use would give the industry a framework for planning, deployment, and management, per the Manila Times report. Joel Agustin, Globe's senior vice president for service planning and engineering, put it more bluntly: digital infrastructure is as essential as roads and power systems.
The 'Dig Once' rule under the Konektadong Pinoy Act
The proposal is anchored on the "Dig Once" policy in Section 17 of the Konektadong Pinoy Act, or Republic Act 12234 — the law that overhauled the country's data transmission rules. Dig Once means that when a road is excavated, shared conduits should be installed in that single dig, instead of different companies tearing up the same street again and again for their own cables.
Globe and the PCTO argue this would lower costs, speed up network rollouts, prevent repeated excavations, and protect the industry's investments. If the framework is adopted, overhead lines would gradually be phased out and underground conduits would become the standard for future network expansion.
What this could mean for your home internet
For ordinary subscribers, the payoff would be fewer outages — especially during typhoon season and road-widening projects, when overhead fiber is most exposed. Buried, shared conduits could also make it cheaper for operators to extend fiber beyond Metro Manila, since the most expensive part of any rollout is the civil works. Globe is already the operator behind the country's cheapest gigabit fiber plan, and cheaper deployment is one way prices keep moving down.
For now, this is a proposal, not a policy. Globe is asking the government to name a lead agency and get national and local offices working from the same plan — but no agency has been designated yet, and there is no timeline for when a master plan would be drafted. The next move belongs to the government.
