The significance of a basic phone dates to 1849 when Italian Antonio Meucci invented it. Five years later, Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised his own phone but it was American Alexander Graham Bell who first earned a U.S. patent numbered 174,465 on June 14, 1876, for a device he designed to telegraphically transmit voice or sound.
In Davao, the first telephone lines were first introduced in 1900 after the American servicemen arrived in town. The project, then purely a state-funded undertaking, was to link the southwest sector of the gulf of Davao to the eastern seaboard of the Pacific.
Setting up a private phone company to commercially use the phone as the communication apparatus in Mati, Davao Oriental, did not happen until nearly a century later when Congress approved a bill granting a franchise to construct, establish, install, maintain and operate local exchange network in the province of Davao Oriental to Mati Telephone Corporation (MTC).
The license was granted under Republic Act 8675, which lapsed into law on June 25, 1998. The statutory recipient and one of the owners of the company is Connie Go of Mati, Davao Oriental.
The franchise coverage was so extensive that it included the setting up of local exchange networks, pay telephone stations, or wireless local loop for public domestic telecommunications in the entire province without interfering on the wavelengths or frequencies of the existing stations.
Under RA 8675, the franchise has a term of twenty-five (25) years from the date of effectivity, unless revoked or cancelled for failure to comply with the conditions to operate within three years from the approval of its operating permit or provisional authority by the National Telecommunications Commission, functioning nonstop for two years and to commence operations within five years from the grant.
Similar to the guidelines issued to other franchises, the MTC is not allowed to ‘lease, transfer, grant the usufruct of, sell nor assign this franchise or the rights and privileges acquired [under RA 8675] to any person, firm, company, corporation or other commercial or legal entity, nor merge with any corporation or entity, nor shall the controlling interest of the grantee be transferred, whether as a whole or in parts and whether simultaneously or contemporaneously, to any such person, firm, company, corporation or entity’ outside the approval of Congress.
To ensure the firm conducts its activities in the manner prescribed by law, the franchise is required to ‘operate and maintain all its stations, lines, cables, systems and equipment for the transmission and reception of messages, signals and pulses in a satisfactory manner at all times, and as far as economical and practicable, modify, improve or change such stations, lines, cables, systems, and equipment to keep abreast with the advances in science and technology.’
Moreover, the MTC is required to ‘operate and maintain all its stations, lines, cables, systems and equipment for the transmission and reception of messages, signals and pulses in a satisfactory manner… [and to] modify, improve or change such stations, lines, cables, systems, and equipment to keep abreast with the advances in science and technology.’
Tragedy, however, struck the owner of the phone company twelve years after its approval. On September 30, 2010, Connie Go, one of the company’s principal shareholders, was stabbed to death inside her residence. She sustained thirty-three wounds. Rodolfo Gonzales, supposedly the victim’s lover for nearly three decades, and son Nico Silvestre, were arrested for the crime. The offense was allegedly due to Go’s claim the younger Gonzales is the nonmarital son of Rodolfo by another woman.
On April 8, 2022, prior to the termination of the Duterte presidency, RA 11674 became a law; it renewed for another twenty-five years the franchise granted to MTC under RA 8675.
