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)