The Asian Carriers Conference 2022 (ACC 2022) hopes to serve a new breed of customers and forge partnerships that will enable the evolving digital landscape. Back after a two-year hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, ACC 2022 delves into more than just telecommunications and carriers but also innovations and the future of networks and communications.

“If we look now at ACC, it’s no longer just all about the carriers coming in,” said Albert Villa-Real, president and CEO of PLDT Global Corp. (PLDT Global), who spoke with the media at the sidelines of ACC 2022. “It’s also all about the different companies from different verticals. It’s a whole slew of all these new technologies that I think will be pivotal in the next five to 10 years. So what’s good about this is now we’re able to discover innovations and see how we can leverage and move forward into the future and not be left behind.”

This year’s conference is being held in Boracay and PLDT Global is one of the major sponsors along with PLDT Enterprise.

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The conference highlights how the industry is going beyond telecommunications and is hoping to cover all aspects of digitalization, which include further improving efficiency, sustaining digital transformation, and adopting emerging technologies, among others.

Networking

Villa-Real underscored the efforts of PLDT Group to further bolster its investments in undersea cables with the aim of connecting the Philippines with the rest of the world. PLDT launched the Jupiter Cable a few weeks ago and the integrated telco also announced the construction of its fourth cable landing station to be located in Baler, Aurora, and the initial construction phase of the Asia Direct Cable (ADC) system, by the end of the year.

One of Asia’s biggest IT networking events, which has been in running for 18 years, features topics about the Metaverse, global Internet of Things, application to person messaging (A2P), 5G technology, and communications to improve customer service.

Talks on metaverse will take centerstage at this year’s conference with futurist Mike Walsh, CEO of Tomorrow, giving the keynote later in the day (today). The conference will also delve into the role of telecoms in the metaverse as well as how else an artificial intelligence (AI) be maximized not that it is being used in mainstream services.

Villa-Real believes that the new collaborations will bring the IT and telecom industries, which drastically changed during the pandemic, forward. Thought leaders are expected to paint the new industry trends that will define and shape the new digital reality.