Mostly great, except for Internet connectivity

Christiani Tumelap, Contributor, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

For German traveler Juergen, 37, many of Jakarta's hotels, with their luxurious interiors, spacious rooms and friendly staff, are actually much better than the ones back home.

The only thing he truly misses from the hotels he visited here is proper Internet connections.

"I wish the hotels here, at least the major ones, had complete in-room Internet facilities like in big hotels in Europe. In my country, several big hotels provide not only modem connections but also cordless keyboards so travelers who don't carry notebooks can still surf on the net without having to pay for the expensive business center facilities," he told The Jakarta Post.

His wish reflect the fact that the Internet has changed the way many people work and play at home, the office and on the road. For many people, the Internet has become a lifestyle and necessity.

Juergen said he was quite happy to find major chain hotels in Jakarta provide Internet access in the guest rooms although only by installing additional lines for data-transmission use. The majority of hotels in this country do not even bother to provide such connections.

Among the hotels in Jakarta whose lines in the guest rooms can be used for Internet purposes are the Mandarin, Mulia Senayan, Gran Melia, Borobudur, Aryaduta and Kempinski Hotel Plaza. No wireless keyboard provided, let alone personal PC except for use in the business center.

"But the modem line in the hotels here usually sucks. Sometimes it takes five minute just to download my file," Juergen, the engineer-turned-businessman, added.

Internet connections in Indonesia have been notorious for their snail-pace transmission speeds and frequent hanging, which are just the natural consequences of the country's poor line connections.

However, several big hotels have been anticipating the problems by utilizing fiber optic cables instead of the commonly used cooper-based cables to allow faster data transmission speeds.

The Kempinski hotel, for example, provides high speed Internet access connected to Biznet, an Internet service provider which is also the hotel's sister company, via fiber optic cable.

"We provide a special cabling system to produce high speed Internet access with 100 megabits/second Ethernet connection permanently installed in all rooms on the two allocated I-Room floors, one of which is the Executive Floor," Kempinski's public relations director Uraini Umarjadi told the Post.

Guests choosing to stay in the I-Rooms, which were launched in September 2000, are subjected to a surcharge of US$15 plus government tax and service charge per room per night. "But, there's no telephone charge for use of the Internet connection," Uraini said.

Other hotels like the Mandarin are also providing its guest rooms with Internet access. All the rooms in the Mandarin are equipped with additional lines for modem use. But for guests who demand faster connections, the Mandarin will provide plug-and- play Internet access upon request, said Dhaneswari Retnowardani, the assistant to the Mandarin's public relations manager.

"Most of our guests have asked for faster Internet access. So as a response to their demands, we've changed our telephone cabling to fibre optic and will install the faster plug-and-play Internet connections in all rooms on five dedicated floors. So far, we've completed two floors," she said.

Both the Kempinski and Mandarin have yet to provide Internet hardware such as wireless keyboards or Internet-enabled TVs because there is not enough demand for it.

"Most of our guests are businesspeople, they bring their laptops for work while traveling so what they need basically is fast Internet connection to support their laptop usage," Dhaneswari said. She said a new Mandarin hotel in New York that is slated to open in 2003 will be equipped with keyboards and Internet-enabled TVs.