Beeper rivalry leads to price war

JAKARTA (JP): Even though the government has set minimum subscription fees for radio paging services, several beeper operators are currently attempting to cope with the increasing competition by offering lower fees.

Karna Brata Lesmana, chief commissioner of PT Duta Pertiwi Santosa, a private firm operating the Starpage beeper service, acknowledged yesterday that the government has set the minimum subscription fee for beeper services at Rp 27.500 (US$11.72), including the 10 percent value added tax, per month.

However, several operators currently offer a subscription fee of only Rp 25,000 per month, he said.

He said that subscribers should consider not only the levels of the subscription fees but also the services provided by the operators before deciding on a pager service, including the speed of the transferring of messages and the paging coverage.

Karna said that in order to get more customers, many radio paging operators also provide subsidies on the sales of pager terminals.

A subsidizing operator may recover the costs of pager terminals only after collecting subscription fees for two years, he said.

He admitted that losing a subscriber who had subscribed for less than two years would disadvantage the operator.

Duta Pertiwi, which involves Motorola of the United States in its Starpage service, currently serves 70,000 subscribers in Jakarta.

Karna said that his company plans to enter the market in Ujungpandang in South Sulawesi later this year, with some 3,000 subscribers expected to register in the first year of operation.

Throughout the country, there are currently 400,000 beeper subscribers. (icn)