Kabelvision sees revenues reaching Rp 400 billion

JAKARTA (JP): Cable television company, Kabelvision, expects to book total revenues of about Rp 400 billion (about US$42 million) this year, far higher than the Rp 60 billion recorded in 2000, thanks to the company's massive expansion program.

Kabelvision's president Handoko A. Tanuadji said on Wednesday the expansion of its cable networks and broadband Internet services would boost the number of household subscribers to 200,000 from about 40,000 at present.

"Kabelvision currently has about 40,000 household subscribers in Jakarta and Surabaya. By the end of the year, we expect to gain about 200,000 household subscribers," he told journalists at the launching of Kabelvision's broadband Internet service here.

He said the figure did not include the company's corporate subscribers.

The company has also just begun operations in Denpasar, Bali, and by the end of the year, will expand to Bandung, Semarang and Medan, he said.

Handoko said the broadband Internet service was becoming more popular because the telephone tariff was still too high for most of the country's household Internet users.

To date there are approximately two million Internet users in the country, with only 13 percent accessing the Internet from their own homes, according to a survey by AC Nielsen.

Broadband Internet connection, which eliminates high phone bills, will encourage people to subscribe to it, Handoko said.

Kabelvision, working together in a revenue sharing scheme with six Internet service providers (ISP) -- LinkNet, IndosatNet, CBN, Centrin, UniNet and M-Web -- charges Internet users a subscription fee of about Rp 300,000 a month.

"The monthly billing may vary between ISPs," Handoko said.

A Kablevision subscriber can upgrade his membership to include Internet connection by subscribing to one of the ISPs, he said.

In addition to a monthly charge, a customer will also need to buy or rent a cable-modem to access the Internet. M-Web and IndosatNet offer customers a choice of buying or renting the cable-modem, while the other four ISPs require customers to buy their own cable-modem, which costs around Rp 2.4 million per unit.

To access the broadband service, customers will also need a personal computer with an ethernet card (10Base-T) to connect their computers to the cable televison network with a speed of up to 10 million bits per second.

Handoko said that while a subscriber of Kabelvision has the choice of not subscribing to broadband Internet service, it does not work the other way around.

"We have not been able to block television broadcasts from our broadband Internet service, therefore we require Internet subscribers to also subscribe to cable television," he said, explaining that Internet connection was only possible with a cable-modem.

Kabelvision has invested an additional $2 million in setting up the Internet connection service, Handoko said, adding that the money was to add a cable-modem termination system (CMTS) to the existing infrastructure. CMTS provides high-speed data transfer over cable television systems.

"(That) brings our total investment to around $50 million," he said.

Kabelvision, owned by publicly listed PT Broadband Multimedia -- a subsidiary of the Lippo Group -- was established in 1994. (tnt)