Text messages up by 100 percent

Text messages up by 100 percent

Leony Aurora, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

With new, cheaper cellular cards on the market and more people
owning cell phones, text messaging during Idul Fitri saw a
tremendous jump of almost 100 percent this year as compared to
last year.

The country's biggest cellular operator, Telkomsel, reported
traffic of 87 million short messages on Idul Fitri, which fell on
Nov. 14 this year. Idul Fitri eve saw 72.5 million text messages
sent, and the day after Idul Fitri, 50 million messages.

Last year, the number of text messages sent during the Islamic
holiday was 40 million per day.

"Telkomsel's short message services (SMS) center's capacity is
4,000 messages per second," said the company's spokesman, Suryo
Hadianto, recently. "The jump in text messaging was well-
managed."

Telkomsel currently has 14.9 million subscribers to three
services, namely its post-paid card Kartu Halo, pre-paid Simpati,
and recently launched Kartu As.

Calculated roughly, the operator reaped at least Rp 47 billion
(US$5.2 million) from texting activities in the period of Nov. 13
to Nov. 15.

However, the surge in the number of messages proved to be
troublesome. Indosat, which offers services Matrix, Mentari, and
M3 Smart, faced an overloaded network on the eve of Idul Fitri,
making it difficult for customers to send and receive text
messages.

"We had increased our capacity to 75 million SMSs per day to
anticipate (the increase during) Idul Fitri," said Indosat
cellular marketing director Hasnul Suhaimi. "However, a huge
number of messages were sent simultaneously, causing some delay."

Some 55 million messages were sent by Indosat customers on
Idul Fitri, 2.5 times the normal number in a day.

Hasnul said the operator would try to increase its capacity
for New Year.

PT Excelcomindo Pratama (XL), which operates pre-paid cards
Bebas and Jempol, also saw a surge in text messaging on Idul
Fitri.

Corporate communications manager Debora Amelia Santoso said
that traffic peaked one day before and one day after Idul Fitri
and reached 50 million messages per day.

Traffic until the end of the year is also expected to increase
due to XL's current promo, which allows its users to send up to
100 messages per day for free to fellow XL users. The promo lasts
until Dec. 31.