Text message traffic soars during holiday

Text message traffic soars during holiday

Sari P. Setiogi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The number of text messages sent in Indonesia soared by up to
500 percent over the Idul Fitri holidays.

"Our text message traffic was up to five times higher than the
normal level. We estimated earlier that it would only increase by
up to three times," cellular phone operator PT Excelcomindo
Pratama's spokesman Fritz E. Simandjuntak told The Jakarta Post
on Thursday.

Excelcom now offers two services, Excelcom and Pro-XL for the
post-paid and prepaid sectors respectively.

Texting is now a cheap, easy and quick alternative for people
wanting to send greetings to their relatives and friends. A text
message only costs between Rp 250 (0.3 U.S. cents) and Rp 350.

"The highest volume of traffic was on the eve of the 25th and
on Nov. 25 itself, the first day of the Idul Fitri," said Fritz.

He acknowledged there had been significant delays in delivery,
but messages had never arrived later than one day. "The traffic
was almost back to normal on Tuesday afternoon," said Fritz.

On a normal day, Excelcom's carries between eight and nine
million text messages.

"Things were worse as subscribers were sending messages at the
same time, so there was piles (of messages) waiting to be
delivered simultaneously," said Fritz.

He predicted that traffic volumes would also be high during
the upcoming Christmas and New Year holidays, "but it will not be
as much as on Idul Fitri".

At the moment, Excelcom has about 2.7 million customers for
its post-paid and prepaid services.

Separately, Faszri Sentosa, the sales and marketing director
of PT Indosat -- which issues Mentari, Matrix, Smart and Bright
cellular phone cards -- estimated that text message traffic would
reach its peak around the New Year, reaching an average of 25
million messages per day.

"However, we have increased our delivery capacity from 700
messages per second to 1,200," Fadzri told the Post.

During Idul Fitri, Indosat's SMS traffic increased to 16
million messages per day, compared to an average of 10 million on
normal days.

"It was still less than our earlier estimate of 24 million per
day so everything was still under control," said Fadzri.

However, the award for highest traffic levels has to go to
Telkomsel, the country's largest cellular phone service provider.

With a total of almost 10 million subscribers across the
country, Telkomsel delivered about 55 million text messages on
Tuesday.

"On Monday, 47 million messages had already been sent, a very
significant increase from the 15 million messages on normal
days," the general manager of the company's sales and customer
services for Eastern Indonesia, Agus P. Simorangkir, told the
Post.

He said the company had anticipated the increased traffic
volume by upping its delivery capacity to 4,000 messages per
second, giving it one of the largest capacities worldwide.

The increase in texting came on the back of increasing
familiarity with the service on the part of the public, as well
as more texting options from the company, said Agus.

"This year, we offered SMS Pos, which enables subscribers to
send greetings to relatives and friends who do not possess
handsets. Greetings are delivered using the postal service."

Commenting on the delays experienced by subscribers in East
Java as reported by Antara on Tuesday, Agus said this area was
the main destination for those returning to their hometowns for
the Idul Fitri holidays.

"So East Java experienced the highest text volumes over
Lebaran and the radio network might well have become overloaded,"
he said.

At the moment, there are over one million subscribers to
Telkomsel's Kartu HALO post-paid service, while Simpati, the
company's pre-paid service, has about 8.4 million customers
across the country.