The first private firm in the region to get a license to install, operate, and maintain a telephone system in Davao Province was Davao Telephone Company (DTC). Passed by the Senate and House of Representatives, its franchise was approved on November 28, 1931, by American governor-general Dwight F. Davis under Act No. 3913.
Created in accord with Act No. 3108, the Public Utility Commission (PUC) approved on March 19, 1923, the DTC was granted a 50-year corporate lifespan, subject to the right and privilege ‘to construct, maintain and operate’ in Davao town and adjacent municipalities and municipal districts’ and to install a telephone system in the province ‘to carry on the business of the electrical transmission of conversations and signals.’
In detail, the statute specifies and authorizes the company (i) ‘to use all municipal and provincial roads, streets, and public thoroughfares for the construction, maintenance, and operation of all apparatus, conductors, and appliances necessary for the electrical transmission of conversations and signals,’(ii) ‘to erect poles, string wires, build conduits, lay cables,’ and (iii) ‘to construct, maintain, and use such other approved and generally accepted means of electrical conduction in, on, over, or under the public roads, highways, lands, bridges, streets, lanes, and sidewalks and overhead or underground lines or on the surface of the ground.’
Back then, franchise laws had very detailed parameters on which a license was granted; it was also about how and where to mount the installations. Under Act 3913, the company was required to erect poles, including their heights, and conduits in places chosen by the province or town, with the condition that these did not disfigure the streets, the wires and underground cables follow the standards set by the Public Service Commission. The same law mandates that clusters of wires and conductors are placed on poles or buried underground.
There are also oddities in the DTC franchise that can get the attention of today’s observers, such as the legality of making excavations or laying conduits in public places, which were subject to certain conditions if these activities result in disturbance, alteration, or change, repairs and restoration must be done to the satisfaction of the provincial engineer and to leave them in good condition as they were prior to the works.
Another interesting section of the statute is the provision that the devices and accessories employed by the grantee ‘shall be modern and first class in every respect, and all telephone lines or installations used, maintained and operated,… shall be kept and maintained at all times in a satisfactory manner, so as to render an efficient and adequate telephone service, and… to modify, improve, and change such telephone system for the electrical transmission of conversations and signals by means of electricity in such manner and to such extent as the progress of science and improvements in the method of electrical transmission of conversations and signals by means of electricity may make reasonable and proper.’
The prewar high standards set by Congress before a franchise was granted are quite impressive given the kind of services that telco companies extend to subscribers today. Better still, the statute clearly defines that the rights granted to the franchisee are not exclusive. In case of a takeover, the poles, wires and conduits installed by the previous telephone licensee, including the electrical transmissions of messages and signals owned by a previous grantee, are not to be removed so ‘as not to impair the efficient and effective transmission of conversations or signals’ under the regime of the new franchisee.
In today’s technologically advanced wireless telephone system, the rules of the game have dramatically changed, and the concept of telephony has become strictly borderless.
