Telkom to invest $250m in CDMA next year
Telkom to invest $250m in CDMA next year
Rendi A Witular, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
State-owned telecommunications firm PT Telekomunikasi
Indonesia plans to invest at least US$250 million next year in a
bid to boost network coverage and the customer base of its newly-
launched fixed-wireless service, TelkomFlexi.
Telkom's president Kristiono said that next year the company
would allocate at least $500 million for capital expenditure with
50 percent of this being used to expand TelkomFlexi's network and
service.
"We plan to concentrate on TelkomFlexi next year with the
target of netting at least 1.2 million users. That is why we need
to put most of our resources into these products," said Kristiono
on a sidelines of a seminar on Wednesday.
He explained that the planned capital expenditure would be
entirely drawn from the company's own resources.
TelkomFlexi is a fixed-wireless service using the latest
technology, Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA).
By using the service, customers can carry their fixed-line
phones outside their homes as long as they are still within reach
of a base transreceiver station (BTS). One station has a radius
of more or less five kilometers.
For the time being the service, which is being used thus far
by 385,000 customers, only covers parts of Greater Jakarta, but
next year Telkom plans to expand it to 41 cities.
Regarding the re-auditing of Telkom's 2002 financial report,
Kristiono said that he could not guarantee that it could be
concluded by the end of this month as initially planned.
"We will maximize our use of the time we have in this month,
but I just cannot give the definite time of completion," he said.
Telkom, which is listed on the Jakarta Stock Exchange and the
New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), was forced by the U.S. Securities
and Exchange Commission to re-audit its 2002 financial report
after some inadequacies were found.
The SEC initially gave Telkom until September to resubmit the
audited 2002 financial report.
However, Telkom was unable to meet the deadline and asked for
another month to complete the work. But, as Kristiono indicated
on Wednesday, Telkom could fail again to meet the deadline.