ADSL, a great way to access the Net -- but at a price

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Have you lost the excitement of having a nonstop, cable TV-based connection to the Internet?

Does your browser seem to crawl in the evenings and during weekends?

If you had paid US$300 for the old cable modem, are you regretting your investment? If your answers are mostly affirmative, you are not alone.

The downside of the once speedy cable Internet service is that the bandwidth is shared. What it means is that its performance is affected by the number of subscribers that are using it at any given time.

So, as your neighbors were all checking Detik.com in the early morning of July 23 to find out about Gus Dur's maklumat (decree), you would have had a painfully slow connection to the Internet.

If the cable network company fails to anticipate the growth of its subscriber base and does nothing to increase its capacity accordingly, your access speed will simply continue to deteriorate.

So, before your cable Internet access becomes slower than your dial-up connection, you may want to start considering ADSL, a new Internet access service that has become available in some parts of Greater Jakarta, Bogor and Serang.

As your location should be within five kilometers of a telephone switching office, you will have to first check with PT Telkom whether your area is already covered by the service. You can call 147 for this information.

The Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, or ADSL, is a broadband Internet access that has gained a lot of popularity everywhere in the world.

In Southeast Asia, Singapore was the first to offer this service, which they called Magix.

Alcatel, one of the world's largest telecommunications vendors, has been largely responsible for the development and widespread adoption of the ADSL technology.

ADSL uses the same copper wires that run from your telephone operator's switching office into your house.

However, the circuits have been fine-tuned so that the same phone line can also transfer digital data at a high speed. Better still, you can continue to use the same line for phone conversation and fax transmission while your PC is accessing the Web.

Telkom offers three classes of ADSL services: The 384 kilobytes per second, 512 Kbps Limited and 512 Kbps Unlimited. If you choose the lowest class, you will get a 24-hour access to the Internet service provider (ISP)of your choice with free traffic up to 500 megabytes. If you exceed the 500 MB limit, Telkom will charge you an additional Rp 500 for every megabyte of traffic.

If you choose the more expensive 512 Limited, you will have 500 MB of free data traffic. Any additional megabytes of traffic will also cost you Rp 500.

If you want an unlimited access to the Internet, go for the 512 Unlimited, which will allow you to download huge audio and video files without incurring additional charge.

But, what about the monthly subscription charge?

Telkom charges Rp 250,000 for the 384 Kbps service. The faster 512 Kbps Limited will cost you slightly higher, i.e. Rp 300,000.

If you want the unlimited access, you should be prepared to pay Rp 1,200,000 per month. The setup charge ranges from Rp 250,000 to Rp 500,000.

Unfortunately, as is the case with your dial-up access, you will be billed by both the telecom operator and the ISP.

Once you subscribe to Telkom's ADSL service, you will still have to subscribe to the access service offered by any of the four ISPs currently on the network: CBNNet, MetroNet, LinkNet or Telkom's own ASTINet.

If you choose CBNNet, the setup charge will be Rp 250,000. The monthly charge for 250 MB of data traffic, which is its cheapest ADSL service, will be Rp 350,000.

The unlimited ADSL service will cost you a whopping Rp 5 million a month. For CBNNet's rates, you can visit www.cbn.net.id/mmaprice.html.

So, if you are already unhappy with your current cable Internet service, you have an alternative. ADSL is faster and the performance is not affected by how many of your neighbors are also accessing the Internet at the same time, but it certainly cost a lot, lot more.

The cheapest service will cost you Rp 350,000 (to be paid to the ISP) + Rp 250,000 (to be paid to Telkom) and Rp 60,000 tax (to be paid to the tax office to support the government).

And do not forget that you will have to purchase your own ADSL modem, which will cost you between US$170 and US$250. Clearly, at this stage, ADSL is not for everybody -- yet.