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.