Motorola and Indolink First Pacific sign contract

JAKARTA (JP): PT Indolink First Pacific, a nationwide beeper operator, yesterday signed a US$1.8-million contract with Motorola, a telecommunications giant of the United States, for the purchase of Flex, a new transmission system.

Indolink is controlled by the Hong Kong-based First Pacific Communications Holdings, in which Salim Group has a stake, and the employee cooperative of the Ministry of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications.

Indolink, which started operations in June 1994, currently has some 25,000 subscribers.

Under the contract signed yesterday, Indolink will acquire Motorola's C-Net controllers and Nucleus transmitters. C-Net is the dominant system used in more than 90 percent of Asia's Flex installations.

Indolink's director, Hendarso Hadiparmono, said that his company plans to have the Flex system operationally ready by the third quarter of this year.

The system will introduce a breakthrough technology to the island of Java, making Indolink the first beeper operator to provide full coverage for the island.

Hendarso said that Indolink would also use Flex alphanumeric pagers in the near future.

The Flex system is a standard for high-speed paging and has been adopted by the major paging operators in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Hong Kong.

The government has set a new regulation allowing 10 operators to serve national radio paging service networks. There are currently six firms licensed to operate radio paging nationally, including PT Telematrixindo which operates EasyCall, PT Persada Komindo which operates Nusa Page and PT SkyTelindo which operates Skytel.

The other three services are Starpage of PT Duta Pertiwi Santosa, Telepage of PT Buana Bintangbayu and Indolink.

In addition to the nationwide operations, Indolink, Skytel and Easycall have been permitted to operate Southeast Asia-wide paging services.

Competition has since become stiffer among beeper operators in the country, many of whom are attempting to win the market by inviting foreign partners to joint them through direct investment placement or to increase participation in other businesses.

The government has set a target of three million beeper subscribers by the end of the Sixth Five-Year Development Plan period in March 1999.(icn)