Making calls is cheaper, thanks to competition

Making calls is cheaper, thanks to competition

Zatni Arbi, Contributor, Jakarta

If you live in Jakarta and own several GSM mobile phones, you may be having a hard time trying to decide which one of those you should give away. To make it all the more difficult, it is not easy to find a family member or relative who does not have a cellular phone already.

Why do you want to get rid of your GSM cell phone? Because the three fixed wireless operators in Jakarta are enticing new subscribers with truly irresistible offers -- free credit and free SMS.

As you may have noticed, over the past few months, these operators have been promoting their free or discounted offers aggressively in both print and electronic media.

Not surprisingly, GSM operators such as Pro-XL have climbed onto the bandwagon, offering free calls after midnight with their Pro-XL Bebas SIM card. Even Mobile-8, our only CDMA-based cellular operator, has been prompted to put its generous services under the spotlight to attract subscribers.

In addition, Star One -- the new fixed wireless service from Indosat -- is offering free calls all day Sunday until the end of the year. If you are a post-billing customer, you can also make free calls to another Star One subscriber from 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. Registration is free for new subscribers and there are no monthly charges for the three months until December.

Bakrie Telecom, provider of Esia fixed wireless services, has gone even further to lure subscribers. It has forged an alliance with Nokia, and those who buy the Nokia 2112 CDMA handset can enjoy the Gile Bener package -- which means something like "simply crazy" in English. The package provides unlimited free local calls to fellow Esia subscribers and even to Telkom fixed- line subscribers until the end of December.

So, if you are one of those people whose ears never seem to get burned by cellular phones, this is truly an unbeatable way to save money and satisfy your need to gossip incessantly. The N2112 is said to be around Rp 1.1 million, and you can talk for 24 hours non-stop on any day of the week. Sending SMSs are also free of charge.

One question that immediately popped into my head when I heard about this offer was whether Esia could guarantee there would be no network failure due to overloading.

According to A. Noorman Iljas from Esia, the company's engineering department has made sure that the infrastructure is ready. Let us see whether the operator can handle the explosion of traffic when more people buy its very attractive Gile Bener package.

Bakrie Telecom is a veteran player in the telecom industry. Long before CDMA made inroads to Indonesia, the company was already providing services to areas where state company Telkom had not set up infrastructure or were already at full capacity with a wireless phone service called Ratelindo.

Today, Ratelindo is used by around 120,000 subscribers. The company no longer accepts new subscribers, however, as they are promoting their CDMA 2000-1x fixed wireless service. Quality- wise, there is no question that Esia is a much better alternative than Ratelindo.

One of the reasons is that Esia uses the 800 MHz band frequency that is licensed for Ratelindo in Jakarta and West Java. This band frequency, according to Iljas, is ideal for CDMA networks, and provides better voice quality and enables each base station to cover a larger area.

Bakrie Telekom has not yet decided to enter the data market, but its infrastructure is already capable of supporting data transmission.

Courtesy of the company, I was able to play around with their mobile Internet access, which has been available only to internal research and development staff.

I borrowed their iPaq and CDMA AirCard and browsed. At home, I took out the Sierra Wireless AirCard 555 PC-Card from the personal data assistant's jacket and inserted it into my ThinkPad, and I was able to access the Internet wirelessly using Esia's infrastructure.

The signal at my home was not very good, unfortunately, so the speed was rather slow. However, being able to access the Internet via a cellular phone network really gave me a sense of ultimate freedom. I truly hope that in a year or two, we can do this more easily -- and cheaply -- anywhere in the city.

Esia is operational in Jakarta and Bandung. You may recall my hopelessness in trying to access the Internet when I was in West Sumatra early last month.

I really long for a time when more and more operators go outside the major cities and bring data services to the greater population. This would transform the way Indonesians look at the world, and it will improve our human development index tremendously. It is a pity that Internet access for the masses has been neglected for so long. Let us hope it will become one of the top priorities of our new government.

For now, those of us who live in Jakarta can take advantage of the free services offered by the new operators.

Will they last? Of course not. Soon, these operators will have to start collecting revenues from the services they provide to stay in business and to ensure ROI.

However, at least the increasingly fierce competition among fixed wireless operators -- and cellular operators -- has finally begun to benefit us, the end users.