Globe Telecom’s broadband revenues may double this year and could soon overtake cellular revenues, the company’s head for business and carrier services said on Tuesday.

“Broadband revenues are going up. Year-on-year, we see revenues doubling. As we deploy our broadband access network, we continue to see our revenues growing,” said Globe Carrier Services head Gil Genio during a press briefing of the commercial launch of its cable landing station in Ballesteros, Cagayan.

Globe is now using the newly constructed TGN-IA (Tata Global Network-Intra Asia) cable system within Asia and the associated TGN-P system to the US, supported by the new international cable landing station and domestic backhaul.

Total broadband revenue is less than 10 percent of the cellular firm’s revenue pie, said Genio. “But that’s growing. Yes, we do expect that at some point broadband would generate more than the traditional cellular business.”

“This cable landing station will be a source of revenue for us. The broadband penetration rate in the country is still low and we can take advantage of that with our WiMax, 3G and broadband offerings. Definitely, this project plays a crucial [role in the operations of Globe Telecom],” said Genio.

“Our cable system will support the huge demand of our broadband customers, and most especially the offshoring and outsourcing industry. They will certainly benefit from this investment,” said the Globe official.

Only two million households out of the estimated 20 million in the country have access to broadband service. Genio said Globe’s share of the market is about 12 percent.

Globe registered its strongest broadband subscriber takeup in the fourth quarter of 2008, driven by the healthy demand for wireless broadband offerings. This period’s net additions of about 55,000 exceeded the results of the first three quarters of 2008 enabling the company to close the year with a broadband subscriber base of 234,000, almost double that of 2007.

The new cable landing station will also dramatically improve the resiliency of the country’s telecommunications systems to earthquakes since the northern landing station is located at the eastern side of the identified faults.

This is Globe’s second cable landing station. It was put up to address the increasing demand for international bandwidth. Globe’s first cable system located in Nasugbu, Batangas is vulnerable to earthquakes and other natural calamities.

In order to prevent another disruption of service similar to the Taiwan earthquake, which was experienced 2006, when most of the communications facilities were disconnected, the company is expanding its existing switching and transmission facilities with this new facility to allow facilities for sending and receiving its own network and interconnect traffic via existing international gateway and interexchange carrier systems.

“This is where redundancy now comes into play. Redundancy provides alterative methods of telecommunications capabilities to sustain business operations and eliminate any single point of failure that could disrupt primary services,” said Globe.

The cellular firm is the exclusive landing party in the Philippines to the new cable project spearheaded by VSNL International, a member of the Tata Group of India, which built a first private submarine cable system the TGN-IACS in the Asia Pacific region.

The 17,000-kilometer cable network will link the Philippines to Hong Kong, China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan with possible extensions to other countries in Southeast Asia.