Large bandwidth required to make voice calls

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): The disappointment seems to be increasingly pervasive, and the complaints becoming louder. The reason? The cable Internet service in some parts of Jakarta is not improving, in fact it has been getting worse.

"My dial-up connection is now faster than my cable Internet service." "They promised they would increase the bandwidth, but I do not think they are doing anything about it." "My work depends so much on the Internet, but lately I haven't been able to access many of the websites in the U.S. and Europe." We hear such remarks more nowadays. Unfortunately, once you have gotten accustomed to the convenience of a 24-hour broadband connection to the Internet, you become hooked to it. Besides, depending on your Internet activities, the monthly cost for the cable service is actually not so bad.

If you still have a dial-up service subscription, you have an alternative to fall back on. However, if you chose to discontinue your dial-up subscription when you subscribed to the cable Internet service, you would be stuck. It would even be worse if you had invested US$300 for an early version of the cable modem.

The problem with the cable modem service, as was mentioned some time ago, is that the bandwidth is shared. If the number of customers grows but the size of the "pipe" remains the same, eventually we will have a situation that resembles Jakarta's traffic. And, when the connection is slow, forget about Internet telephony.

Several weeks ago we looked at an alternative, i.e. the ADSL service, which has become available in some parts of the city and in other towns. However, in general we still cannot justify the high costs. Besides, we have to be located, at the most, five kilometers from Telkom's central office.

Another viable alternative, which is not yet widely available, is the wireless broadband service. This uses Qualcomm's CDMA- based technology, which can provide 1.8 Mbps download speed per node. The downside of this technology is that the bandwidth is also shared. If six users are using their maximum capacity to download rich multimedia files, each will get a download speed of only 300 Kbps. While it is still faster than the dial-up modem speed, it may not be adequate for streaming videos and reasonably comfortable telephone conversations.

Another solution for our thirst for broadband Internet access is the satellite-based access. Until now the problem with this type of service is that it requires a hefty upfront investment in transceivers and gateways, while the cost itself is not cheap. Besides, in most cases, the technology used still requires that the uplink uses the old public telephone network.

Fortunately, other technological solutions are also being developed. This is not surprising as demands for broadband Internet access have been growing rapidly. In developed markets such as U.S., U.K., Taiwan, Japan, Australia and South Korea, Internet users are shifting to broadband services in hordes.

The latest alternative for broadband access to the Internet that you should know of -- if you love technology -- is an unmanned solar plane called Helios. Developed by NASA and AeroVironment (www.aerovironment.com), a prototype of Helios was tested in the Kauai island in Hawaii just last Monday, Aug 13, 2001. A flying platform like the Helios promises broadband links for the masses at a lower cost than using satellites.

There are other types of flying platforms being developed, including light planes. One or two of them may one day offer us wireless broadband access to the Net. As for now, we still do not have a winner, but we can be optimistic that in two to three years' time there will be other options besides the cable network.

Once we have a fast and stable broadband connection, making voice calls over the Internet will just be as simple as subscribing to a sophisticated Voice over IP (VoIP) service such as the one offered by GoBeam (www.gobeam.com).