High telephone tariffs 'may hamper RI's IT'

High telephone tariffs 'may hamper RI's IT'

SAN FRANCISCO (JP): High telephone tariffs in Indonesia may
hamper the development of the country's information technology,
according to a senior telecommunications executive.

Adi R. Adiwoso, one of the country's telecommunications
experts and magnates, said here Tuesday that the tariffs of
telecommunications in Indonesia should be lowered to increase
number of calls.

"Telecommunications is a volume game. We have to create an
environment which encourages people to make more call traffics,"
he said here yesterday.

Adiwoso is on a week visit in the U.S, one Minister of
Tourism, Post and Telecommunications Joop Ave's entourage to see
a number of satellite and telecommunications facilities,
including Lockheed Martin which prepares the Asia Cellular
Satellite (ACeS) system and Loral which develops the Multi Media
Asia (M2A) satellite. Adiwoso is the architect of AceS, an Asian
regional satellite cellular system, and M2A, another satellite
system which will provide interactive multimedia and digital
telecommunications services into small fixed antennas directly to
end-users in Asia.

Competitive tariff in telecommunications would stimulate the
use of Internet services, Adiwoso said.

"There are a lot of telecommunications carriers in the U.S. As
the volume is also high, a new comer (telecommunications
operator) in the U.S. will be able immediately to grab a big
volume."

He said that the low telephone tariffs would encourage the use
of Internet services.

"But in Indonesia, the prices of computer, palmtop or what
ever it is called has to be cheaper to encourage the use of
Internet," he said.

"Who will be able to afford millions of rupiah of a terminal
(computer) even though we can offer a call as low as US$0.1 per
minute for any kind of voice call through the satellite network?"

He said that computer producers had to follow the trend of
decreasing tariffs in telecommunications industry.

In its recent report, dubbed "Challenging to the Network:
Telecommunications and the Internet", the International
Telecommunications Union (ITU) ranked Indonesia in the 44th place
out of 45 reviewed nations in multimedia access. The rank is
based on penetration of telephone line density, TV set density
and Internet hosts density.

There are currently some 5 million telephone lines in
Indonesia.

Adiwoso said that in addition to the conventional fixed
telephone lines, satellite system will also increase number of
Internet users in Indonesia, which is currently preparing its
super-highway information technology, dubbed as Nusantara-21.

The information infrastructure project is part of Indonesia's
vision to make the country a fully fledged member of the global
information society by early in the next century. The Nusantara
21, a multi-billion-dollar massive communications project, is
designed to connect the whole archipelago to the information
superhighway. The project will include the development of
multimedia technology in several big cities and wide-band super
lanes by the year 2001. (icn)