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.