The Philippines' National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) has fined Globe Telecom, Smart Communications and DITO Telecommunity PHP100,000 (about $1,760) each per day until their mobile broadband services meet required quality-of-service standards in affected areas.

The regulator issued the penalties through separate show-cause orders after repeated concerns over poor or unavailable mobile broadband service, ABS-CBN reported. The move follows three rounds of formal warnings: the NTC says it instructed the three operators to improve service in areas with weak or no signal through memoranda issued in May, August and November 2025.

Alongside the fines, the NTC has ordered all three operators to submit corrective action plans. These must set out the technical measures each company will take, planned infrastructure upgrades and implementation timelines.

To verify compliance, the regulator will conduct network testing every two weeks in the affected areas, while continuing to monitor mobile broadband quality and availability elsewhere in the country.

Operators weigh their responses

The three companies are still reviewing the orders. Smart's parent company PLDT said on September 28 that it had not yet received its show-cause order. DITO said it is discussing the contents of its order with the NTC. Globe said it is studying the matter and will respond within the specified period.

Globe pushed back on the framing, pointing to a Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) scorecard that rated its overall performance as "Good" in August. That scorecard recorded average speeds of 45.9Mbps, coverage of 45.13% and service consistency of 86.75%.

The contrast between the DICT rating and the NTC enforcement action illustrates the measurement gap at the heart of the dispute: aggregate performance figures can look respectable even while specific locations suffer from weak or absent coverage. The NTC's repeated testing will focus on those affected locations to establish whether operators have actually addressed the identified deficiencies.

Strong national numbers, uneven local reality

The enforcement comes at an awkward moment for the regulator's broader narrative, because national broadband performance in the Philippines is improving. According to Ookla data cited by ABS-CBN, the country's median mobile download speed reached 66.3Mbps in August, with median upload speeds of 8.49Mbps and latency of 20 milliseconds.

Metro Manila performs better still. The capital region recorded median download speeds of 95.2Mbps, upload speeds of 10.47Mbps and latency of 15 milliseconds.

Those figures put the Philippines ahead of many regional peers on headline speed, yet they say nothing about the pockets of the country where subscribers report no usable service at all. The NTC's decision to escalate from three memoranda over seven months to daily financial penalties signals that the regulator now considers voluntary improvement insufficient.

For the operators, the financial exposure is meaningful but not existential. PHP100,000 per day amounts to roughly PHP36.5 million per year for each company — a fraction of annual capex for Globe and PLDT, though a more notable sum for the younger DITO, which launched commercial service in 2021 and is still building out its network.

The faster route to stopping the meter is the corrective action plan: once fortnightly testing confirms that service in the affected areas meets the quality-of-service standards, the daily fines should cease. All three operators now face a defined timeline to commit to specific infrastructure upgrades, and the NTC's biweekly testing regime will determine whether those commitments translate into measurable coverage gains.