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.