Cebu Internet: Converge vs PLDT vs Globe (2026)

Fiber internet in Cebu City starts at ₱1,299–₱1,599/month (Aug 2026) on a postpaid plan, read from Converge’s and PLDT’s own plan pages on 16 August 2026. Prepaid fibre, which needs no contract and no Philippine paperwork, starts at PHP 700–PHP 749/30 days (Aug 2026). The plan you pick matters much less than whether fiber physically reaches your building. Coverage is decided block by block, sometimes tower by tower. A condo in IT Park might have three ISPs on the riser. An apartment in upland Talamban might have none.

If your income depends on a stable connection, your ISP decision and your neighborhood choice are the same decision.

What Converge and PLDT Actually Charge in Cebu

Converge Super FiberX runs PHP 1,349 to PHP 2,599 a month for 200 Mbps to 1 Gbps. PLDT Fiber Unli runs PHP 1,299 to PHP 2,699 for 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, plus a PHP 100 monthly installation charge. Both lineups were read from the providers’ own plan pages on 16 August 2026.

The full lineups sit on two pages you can open yourself: Converge’s Super FiberX plans and PLDT Home’s fiber page. PLDT is the more confusing of the two because it sells three overlapping families off one page. Fiber Unli is internet plus a landline. Fiber Unli All adds Cignal TV at PHP 1,399 for 200 Mbps, PHP 1,799 for 500 Mbps and PHP 2,499 for 700 Mbps. Fiber Netflix is a single tier, PHP 1,599 for 300 Mbps. Every Fiber Unli tier bundles a landline, but the unlimited-calls-to-five-nominated-numbers feature is described on the Fiber Unli All plans rather than on plain Fiber Unli.

One correction against our own earlier snapshot. On 12 July 2026 we recorded PLDT Fiber Unli 1699 as “up to 500 Mbps”, footnoted as a six-month promotional boost over a 300 Mbps baseline. That footnote is not on the page today: the comparison table now lists 500 Mbps flat, with no boost language anywhere on the page. Treat PLDT speed labels as a moving target and screenshot the tier you are sold.

Globe is the column we cannot fill. Its postpaid pages return HTTP 403 to every retrieval we attempted on 16 August 2026, across four different paths, so we will not publish GFiber postpaid prices from a tech blog and call them checked. Globe’s verified Cebu offer is prepaid, and it is genuinely competitive. See the prepaid section below.

The Lock-In and the Installation Fee Nobody Quotes

PLDT states its contract term in writing: “The Fiber Unli plans have a contract period of 36 months.” The same page adds that “a PHP 100 monthly installation fee for your internet service will be charged for 36 months as part of your monthly bill”, waived only “if your application is eligible for the Fiber Sale Promo”. Converge states none of this anywhere.

That PHP 3,600 is the number that changes the comparison. A PLDT Fiber Unli 1299 line is PHP 1,299 on the price list and PHP 1,399 on the bill for three years unless the promo catches you, which puts it above Converge’s 200 Mbps Play plan at PHP 1,349 while delivering half the advertised speed. Ask at the point of application whether your specific application qualifies for the Fiber Sale Promo, and get the answer on the contract rather than from the kiosk.

Prepaid Fibre: No Contract, No Documents, Loaded Like a SIM

All three providers now sell reloadable fibre with no contract and no documents, and for a renter on a six-month lease it is often the correct answer. Converge Surf2Sawa loads start at PHP 50 for one day. Globe GFiber Prepaid runs PHP 749 to PHP 1,499 per 30 days. PLDT Fiber Prepaid charges PHP 999 once and includes the first 30 days.

Two details worth carrying into the decision. Globe’s sign-up page advertises a discounted first month on the 300 Mbps tier and warns that a GFiber Prepaid line can be deactivated if you fail to load within three months, which matters if you leave the country for a quarter. PLDT’s PHP 999 offer is date-boxed: its own page states the promo “runs from July 1 to September 30, 2026, per DTI Fair Trade Permit No. FTEB-259828, Series of 2026”, so it is a real permit-backed promo with an expiry rather than an evergreen price.

Prepaid fibre is not a fringe product. SunStar Cebu reported in September 2025 that Converge’s Surf2Sawa passed 500,000 active subscribers since its late-2022 launch, on top-ups running PHP 50 to PHP 700 and average speeds around 50 Mbps. For someone who has just landed, has not committed to a neighborhood, and cannot yet produce a Philippine lease and utility bill, that is the bridge.

Which ISP Covers Which Neighborhood

Fiber availability changes street by street, and no ISP publishes a coverage dataset. The table below reflects serviceability checks and resident reports, not a published source. Verify your exact address before committing to a lease.

Converge itself is explicit that Cebu is not finished. Chief executive Dennis Anthony Uy told SunStar Cebu in March 2025 that “there are still some few towns that we haven’t reached yet” in the province, with a target of covering all the towns and cities of Cebu that year or the next, funded by a PHP 20 billion to PHP 25 billion capital budget and 400,000 to 500,000 new ports weighted toward the Visayas and Mindanao. Eighteen months on, the upland gaps in the table above are the ones still open.

IT Park, Lahug and Cebu Business Park are the safest bets. All three ISPs serve the area, most condo buildings already have fiber on the riser, and installation is correspondingly faster. This corridor removes internet from the list of things that can go wrong.

Banilad and Mabolo have good Converge and PLDT coverage. Globe is building by building. Check the specific address; both neighborhoods work if you confirm at the unit.

Mandaue splits between the core (the A.S. Fortuna corridor, the J Centre Mall area) and the outer zones running toward Consolacion. Core Mandaue has strong PLDT and good Converge coverage. Beyond the main commercial strip, coverage gets noticeably inconsistent, especially in the older residential barangays where fiber runs have not caught up with demand.

Talamban is where internet becomes a real constraint. Lower Talamban near the main road has PLDT and some Converge. The moment you climb toward Pit-os and Busay, fiber availability drops off, and listings that say “internet ready” often mean DSL or fixed wireless. Satellite is the fallback up there, and it is not a cheap one.

Mactan and Talisay remain less reliable than the mainland core. Mactan is a separate island across the channel, with patchier fiber infrastructure and a longer restoration timeline after typhoons and power events. If remote work is your primary income and you are weighing Mactan beach life against mainland fiber, the mainland usually wins the math even after the IT Park rent premium.

The Building Decides This, Not the Neighborhood

A covered neighborhood does not mean a covered unit. PLDT’s own application page is blunt about where the work stops: “in-house wiring will be care of the customer via electrician or building admin”, and “subscribers must secure entry/gate pass and/or permits (as necessary) prior to installation services of PLDT Home field personnel inside gated villages, subdivisions, closed areas, or townhomes.”

Read that as the ISP telling you, in advance, that your building admin is the gatekeeper. In practice that produces three outcomes in Cebu towers: the riser already carries two or three providers and you pick freely; the riser carries one and you take it; or the building will not approve a new entry at all and your choice was made before you viewed the unit.

IT Park and Lahug buildings, in rough order of how much freedom you get:

• Solinea (Alveo Land): Converge, PLDT and Globe lines are present. One of the best-connected buildings in Cebu.
• Avida Towers Cebu / Avida Riala: PLDT is commonly pre-installed, Converge available in most towers. Newer towers tend to carry more options.
• Baseline Residences: Converge and PLDT. Sits at the edge of IT Park with good access to the area’s fiber backbone.
• Calyx Centre: Converge and PLDT.
• Older walk-ups in Lahug: variable. Some are limited to one provider, and a few have no fiber at all and run on DSL or fixed wireless.

Two policy changes are slowly unwinding this. In November 2025 the Department of Information and Communications Technology issued the implementing rules for its “Dig Once” open access and infrastructure-sharing framework, which lets operators lease capacity on each other’s fiber instead of each stringing its own; SunStar Cebu reported the industry expecting six to seven new broadband providers to enter on the back of it. Separately, the Department of Public Works and Highways reconstituted its National Building Code Review Committee under Special Order 155 in April 2026, and telco submissions to that review are pushing for fibre-ready infrastructure to be written into the code for new buildings. The code being reviewed, Presidential Decree 1096, dates from 1977 and was last revised in 2005, which is precisely why a 2008 Cebu tower has one riser and a 2024 one has three.

Neither change helps you this month. Ask the admin which lines already exist before you sign.

Real Speeds vs Advertised Speeds

No measurement firm publishes a Cebu-City-level fixed-broadband average we can verify. City-level pages exist but could not be retrieved on 16 August 2026, and we will not republish a city speed figure we cannot open. What exists is national, and it is enough to rank the three providers even though it cannot tell you what your line will do.

Converge took four Ookla categories on 2H 2025 Speedtest Intelligence data, including Fastest Fixed Network at a Speed Score of 61.12 and Lowest Latency at 13.94, as carried by The Freeman on 29 March 2026. Those are unitless Ookla indices, not Mbps.

The firms disagree by more than a factor of two on magnitude and agree completely on order. That gap is the methodology, not the network: Opensignal’s averages are dragged down by low-tier and legacy lines across the whole subscriber base, while SpeedGeo’s are pulled up by the self-selected users who run speed tests. Neither is a prediction of your unit.

Upload is the underrated metric. Video calls are close to symmetric, and a line with 300 Mbps down and a starved upload will still drop you mid-sentence. PLDT won Opensignal’s upload award at 42.3 Mbps nationally. If your day is back-to-back calls or you push large files to clients, weight upload over the headline download number.

Latency is where the two award programs actually conflict. SpeedGeo’s national ping averages put PLDT lowest at 23.7 ms with Converge at 32.3 ms; Ookla gave Converge the Lowest Latency award for the same rough period. Different test panels, different servers, no reconciliation available. No provider publishes per-ISP round-trip figures from Cebu to Singapore or to US West, and we are not going to invent them, so if regional latency is load-bearing for your work, run your own test from the unit during the viewing and from the same building at 8pm.

Evening slowdowns are real on all three providers, typically between 7 and 10pm when residential usage peaks. They hit shared building infrastructure harder than the fiber itself, which is why two units in the same tower can have very different experiences on the same plan.

Installation Timelines and What Foreigners Need to Apply

Budget one to two weeks in the city core and up to three in outer areas or during a promo rush. Every provider quotes faster; treat the quote as marketing and the calendar as reality. Foreigners are explicitly provided for: PLDT’s accepted-ID list names “Passport, ACR, SRRV for Foreign Individuals” alongside the domestic IDs.

What you need to apply:

• A passport, ACR or SRRV if you are a foreign national, per PLDT’s own application requirements
• Proof of address, normally your lease contract
• Your building’s gate pass or fiber entry permit, which you obtain, not the ISP
• In-house wiring, which is your cost via an electrician or the building admin
• Converge: apply at convergeict.com
• Globe prepaid: apply at gfiberprepaid.globe.com.ph, advertised with no documents and installation inside 24 hours

Postpaid installation labour is normally free on Converge and billed at PHP 100 a month for 36 months on PLDT. Some condos charge their own building permit fee for a new fiber entry, set by the building rather than the ISP. No Cebu tower publishes that schedule, so ask the admin for the figure in writing before you apply.

Backup Options When Fiber Fails

Every ISP has outages, and power interruptions kill your connection regardless of provider. If your work cannot tolerate downtime, you need a second path.

Mobile data (SIM-based hotspot). Smart and Globe both have 5G in IT Park and parts of Lahug, and Globe has been extending mobile coverage well past the metro: SunStar Cebu reported new Globe sites reaching Danao’s Maslog and Taboc, Cordova’s Dapitan, Naga’s Pangdan, Toledo’s Don Andres Soriano and Cebu City’s Basak Pardo in September 2024. Keep a loaded prepaid data SIM as the emergency line, on a different carrier from your fiber provider so one network event cannot take out both.

Coworking spaces. When home internet dies, walk. IT Park has KMC (Skyrise 4), The Company, and Enspace, all of which sell day passes. Day-pass pricing changes often enough that we will not print a figure we checked in April and let it rot; call or check the desk the week you need it.

Dual-ISP setup. Some remote workers run Converge and PLDT in parallel, one primary and one failover. At entry tiers that is ₱2,648/month (Aug 2026) for both lines (Converge Play at PHP 1,349 plus PLDT Fiber Unli 1299 at PHP 1,299), before PLDT’s installation charge. A cheaper version of the same insurance is one postpaid line plus a prepaid fibre line loaded only in the months you need it.

Starlink. The realistic option for upland Talamban, rural Mactan, and anywhere fiber has not reached. It is no longer cheap: the Philippine Residential plan rose to PHP 4,099 per month in 2026, up from PHP 3,700, with Roam 100GB at PHP 3,299 and Unlimited Roam at PHP 5,999. Those figures come from NoypiGeeks’ 21 May 2026 report of the increase, a named secondary; Starlink’s Philippine site does not serve a price sheet we can retrieve. We do not publish a hardware figure: the kit price varies by model and promo, and the secondary sources disagree by thousands of pesos. Price it at Starlink’s own checkout before you budget it, and note that the plan alone now costs more than two fiber lines.

Internet During Typhoon Season

Cebu sits in the typhoon belt, and from July through December the risk is sustained rain, flooding and outages. Internet reliability drops in that window, and the cause is almost always power rather than the fiber itself.

When VECO power goes out, your router goes down with it. A UPS keeps a router and a laptop alive through the short interruptions, which is most of them. For anything longer you need a portable power station or a building with generator backup, and most IT Park condos back up the common areas only. Not all extend it to units. Ask.

The scale of the tail risk is worth knowing. During Typhoon Tino (Kalmaegi) on 4 November 2025, roughly 1.4 million households, mostly across the Visayas, lost power, and by the following morning only about 45% of Cebu’s supply had been restored (Inquirer, November 2025). Fiber lines themselves are more resilient than copper in a storm; what fails is the grid behind them, and the islands and outer towns wait longest for it to come back.

Your defence is a stack, not a single product: live somewhere with reliable power, keep a UPS, keep a loaded mobile data SIM on a second carrier, and know which coworking space is closest. That covers everything short of a catastrophic storm, and in a catastrophic storm your internet is not the problem.

How We Verify This

Every plan price on this page was read from the provider’s own page on 16 August 2026, and every speed figure is attributed to the firm that measured it, with its window and its method. Where a source blocked us or the sources disagreed, we published the gap instead of a plausible number: Globe’s postpaid prices, Converge’s contract and installation terms, both providers’ pre-termination fees, PLDT’s prepaid load prices above 50 Mbps, Starlink hardware, per-building permit fees, and any Cebu-specific speed average.

We do not yet run a dated ISP price ledger the way we run the Cebu electricity rate series, so ISP prices here are a sourced snapshot rather than a tracked series. That is a known weakness and it is the next dataset on the list; the PLDT boost footnote that vanished between our July and August checks is exactly the kind of movement a ledger would capture. Our sourcing and dating rules are in the methodology, and the datasets we do track are in the data catalogue.

For the VECO side of the outage story, see the Cebu electricity guide. For where internet sits in a total monthly budget, see the cost of living breakdown. Before signing, the renting checklist sequences the questions to ask the admin, and the first-month checklist puts VECO, MCWD, SIM and fiber in the order that actually works.