Koes joins the archipelago via cellular links
By Johannes Simbolon and I. Christianto
JAKARTA (JP): A group of 50 high school graduates sailed to Australia some decades ago to pursue on their study on the Colombo Plan scholarship. Among them were two girls from Madiun and Kediri, small towns in East Java's hinterland, who wished to be engineers.
The girls finished their studies. There is nothing special in the story if it ends that way. But, it is special indeed, since both girls ended up becoming the first female engineers to work in Australian telecommunication.
One of the young women was the soft-spoken Koesmarihati Sugondo, who is now president of the cellular phone firm, Telkomsel.
As far as the obsolete perception that engineering is males' work goes, Koes said, Indonesian women were luckier than their Australian counterparts.
At the time when she left for Australia in the 1960s, Indonesia already had a number of female engineers and they were well accepted in the field. In Australia, Koes said, there were few female engineers and those women who did venture into the profession were not well received.
Koes said that a large Australian company would only accept her proposal for work training after her professor intervened. Her acceptance was quite a surprise for the local people.
Born on Oct. 9, 1942, in Bogor, West Java, Koes spent her childhood in many different places because her father worked as a forestry inspector and had to move from one place to another. Her father died in Madiun when she was very young, and the family of seven children -- Koes is the fourth child -- decided to stay in the town. Her mother got a job at a local printing company to feed the big family.
Aware that her mother couldn't afford her study to university, Koes looked for a scholarship. She won the Colombo Plan scholarship along with 49 students from across the country. Among them was Sugondo, her future husband.
Colombo Plan is an organization founded by the Commonwealth countries in 1950 to help develop South and Southeast Asian countries. One of its programs awards scholarships to students from these areas.
Career
Koes received her Bachelor of Engineering degree from University of Tasmania, Hobart, in 1966, and returned to Indonesia the following year to work for the state electricity company, PLN. Here tenure there was short since love pulled her back to Australia a year later. She married Sugondo, who was completing his architecture studies in the kangaroo country.
She remained in Australia until 1975, working in several firms including the Telecom Australia (now Telstra).
Upon her return to Indonesia, she applied for a job with the state Perumtel telecommunication firm (now PT Telkom) and waited for eleven months for a reply. By that time she had taken a job with a private cable firm at salary five times higher than what was being offered by Perumtel.
The salary was not what drew her to the state telecommunications company. "Perumtel has a national-scale work. It has a wider outlook," she said.
Her first assignment was to supervise the installment of telephone cables in Jakarta. As a supervisor, she stayed up until early in the morning watching over her 200 all-male crew working in the ditches, "so that none of them cheated me," she said.
Her career climbed steadily. In 1993 and 1994, she chaired the development division of PT Telkom, was responsible for the plan to lay between 50,000 and one million telephone lines in the country each year.
Koes lobbied for laying fiber optic networks instead of copper cables. Many parties protested, including the domestic cable makers. But she pushed on with the plan.
In hindsight, her decision was strategic genius. Fiber optic cables enlarge telephone transmission capacity, allowing more people to be connected to the telephone grid. A fiber optic as thin as a hair can contain up to 2,000 circuits, while a copper string of the same size can only hold one circuit. Perhaps more importantly, fiber optic cables can also be used for other services, including television broadcast. Koes' decision about fiber optic networks will enable PT Telkom to enter the multimedia business and the Information Age.
In 1994, PT Telkom began construction on its first submarine fiber optic network, linking Tanjungkarang in Lampung and Denpasar in Bali. Since then, it has linked all the main islands in the country with fiber optic networks.
In 1995, PT Telkom restructured its organization. New boards of directors were formed, including one of her peers. Koes was not chosen to sit on the board but she was not disappointed.
Two months later, she found out why she was "left behind". Minister of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications Joop Ave had saved to her for the top position at the newly-formed cellular phone company Telkomsel.
Pilot project
Cellular phones were not a new thing for Koes. As PT Telkom's director of development, she was assigned to set up the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) cellular pilot project in Batam and Bintan islands, which was successfully completed in two months.
Telkomsel was initially co-owned by PT Telkom (51 percent) and PT Indosat (49 percent). Later, as new investors came in, the share ownership composition changed with Telkom possessing 42.72 percent of the shares, Indosat 35 percent, PTT Dutch Telecom 17.28 percent, and Setdco Megacel Asia, owned by Indonesian businessman Setiawan Djody, 5 percent.
"We are proud of the fact that the shares of domestic companies are still larger than that of the foreign company," said Koes, the mother of three who loves morning exercise.
Telkomsel, she said, will benefit from its alliance with a foreign company since the operation of telecommunication requires detailed management, a strength of foreign companies.
Today Telkomsel has recorded 135,000 subscribers of the total 450,000 subscribers nationwide, and hopes to reach between 150,000 and 180,000 subscribers by the end of 1996, up from the annual target of 120,000 subscribers.
She is optimistic that the number of subscribers will reach three million by 2001 because Indonesia's population is becoming more urban, more affluent, and the cost of cellular service is dropping.
Although Telkomsel can't claim the country's largest number of subscribers at present, Koes said, the firm can claim the widest coverage area in Indonesia, and the largest number of base transceiver stations (BTS) in the country. The company plans to reach all provincial capitals and the surrounding areas and the largest part of Java by 1997.
"We want to remain a leading cellular service provider in this country and to attain the world-class standard by 1998. We have assigned a task force for the world-class standard," she said.
As the competition among cellular companies turns tighter, Telkomsel, which now employs 500 workers, up from the 50 workers who started with the company, is determined to stay ahead by improving its service and technology. The newest services it provides to its subscribers is the so-called short message, voice mail, data and facsimile transmission.
In the future all companies will offer similar facilities and technologies, and that the cost of these services will decrease. Koes believes the best strategy for Telkomsel is to capture as much of the prime market as possible before its competitors do, and then strive to retain those subscribers by continually improving their services.
"In the end, it's the subscribers who will benefit from the competition," she said.