Proactive planning needed to develope telecommunications

Proactive planning needed to develope telecommunications

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): My article on wired versus wireline telephones
last week seems to have attracted a few responses. Unfortunately,
when people were calling me over that article, I happened to be
away in Bandung to attend the opening of the annual Techno Pre-
Eminent (TPE) Conference 98 held by RisTI, a research division of
PT Telkom. I am still waiting for the readers to call me again.
My friend Osvaldo Coelho was luckier, as he gave a long comment
on my past article in this papers "Letters" column (Wednesday,
Oct. 7), and successfully got his message across to me.

Mr. Coelho was right when he said that I was not saying
anything new when I asserted that the wireless would take over
the place of the wireline -- or landline -- telephones. But, he
seems to have forgotten that I was not writing the article for
telecom consultants. I was writing for the rest of my readers who
may still think that the monstrous telephone webs over our heads
are the only way to get telephone services into our houses. I
guess it shouldn't be too difficult to see that many people --
even some in our own telecom authority -- were still unaware of
the trend of going wireless.

Mr. Coelho was also correct when he contended that GSM is by
far the most widely used technology for cellular phones today.
With 71 million subscribers in Europe alone by 1997, that may not
change in the near future. Yet, who wants to stay in first gear
all the time? If you have read the latest reports in reputable
magazines such as Tele.com, Business Week and Fortune,
you will also understand why CDMA is going to be the preferred
choice worldwide. The GSM technology is fine, but it has its
limitation. To overcome the limitations, people are now talking
about third generation cellular technology, which is still being
negotiated.

In addition to the benefits of the CDMA that I mentioned in my
last article, it has also been stated that GSM cannot handle data
communications as flawlessly as CDMA. In a GSM network, the hand-
over, which takes place as you leave a cell and enter another,
usually results in a break that hampers data transmission. In a
CDMA network, the handover happens more gradually and the link is
not affected when transferred from one base station to another.
While wireless phones are mainly used for voice communications,
the use of mobile data devices is also gaining momentum.

While, as Mr. Coelho has said, we should not embrace new
technologies simply because they are more appealing, we should
not let ourselves be stuck in old technologies just because the
operators have made huge investments on them. We are all familiar
with the term "leapfrogging". The essence here is that we should
leapfrog proactively.

Indeed, the thrust of my article of last week was actually on
how our telecom authorities and operators need to be more
proactive as they plan and develop our telecom infrastructure.
Just coincidentally, while in Bandung last week I had another
experience that once again demonstrates how this ability to plan
proactively sometimes runs short.

During the press conference that launched the project with HP
and Microsoft, officials at RisTI explained to the journalists
that it was making a serious effort in spearheading e-commerce in
Indonesia. One of the programs that they had focused on the
construction of an e-commerce Web site called RisTI Shop. "This
Web site will be an electronic marketplace where sellers and
buyers can meet and do business," the journalists were told.

E-commerce is unmistakably the current vogue, and we have
already had a lot of discussion on how it has become a fact of
life today. Therefore, when I learned that RisTI was leading the
way to the new e-world, I got very excited myself. I raised a
couple of very basic questions: "Suppose I am interested in
opening a storefront in RisTI Shop, what should I do? How would
you charge me? Am I going to have to pay a monthly fee, or are
you going to just take a certain percentage of the transaction
that I generate through my storefront?" To my surprise, the
answer I received was that these things had not been given any
thought yet.

Now, if one is serious about developing an e-commerce web
site, shouldn't the business strategies be the first things
thought through? Shouldn't one start with, for example, how to
generate income from the venture?

The failure to think and plan for a longer range was an
example of what I would call lack of proactive planning from our
telecom authority. The project has very strong backing from
Microsoft and HP, and the investment is not negligible. HP, for
instance, has committed two servers and five clients for the
project. It would be a pity if such an investment is used just to
learn how to design snazzy Web sites.

The need to plan proactively becomes even more necessary as
competition becomes more unavoidable. Technologies do compete
with each other, and the new ones are almost always better than
the old ones, at least so for the customers. Our cable TV network
is a case in point. Indovision, our cable TV provider, has been
quietly but steadily expanding its networks that inject signals
of more than 40 TV stations through physical cables to residences
in Jakarta. Unknown to many of us, it will bring data
communication through those coaxial cables to the homes as well,
most probably starting early next year. When this happens, we
will have even less need for the fixed overland phone cables that
are not very likely to give us connection speeds beyond 56 Kbps.
Just compare that to the 30 Mbps downstream speed of the cable
connection.

So, a lot is happening in the information and communication
technologies than we may know, and it will be a real pity if we
fail to plan proactively. Moreover, it will be a real shame if we
choose to limit ourselves to the very noisy and highly polluting
bajaj motorized pedicabs while the BMW C1 is now available.