The Internet takes business away from the post office

By Kafil Yamin

BANDUNG (JP): Dewantara, who runs an English college here, has more regular contact with his family in Germany these days, thanks to the presence of the Internet in his life.

He used to go to the post office to send letters, taking a lot of his time and energy. "I had to go to the post office in the center of the town, trapped in traffic jams for hours, buy envelopes and stamps and queue up if I had to send anything express mail," he recalled.

"Now I just turn on my PC in my room, type a few words and send them. It's done in a few seconds," he said.

With some 300,000 Internet users linked to at least 12 Internet providers in Bandung alone, fewer and fewer people go to the post office. According to PT Pos Indonesia, the quantity of mail traffic has been steadily declining during the last three years.

Data at PT Pos Indonesia shows that the quantity of posted letters was recorded at 762,900,587 in 1997. It dropped to 690,514,596 in 1998 and further plummeted to 592,139,723 in 1999.

The most significant drop is in the traffic of individual letters to and from abroad.

"The cause of this trend is too obvious. One no longer needs to go the post office, buy stamps and wait for the letter to reach its destination. You can just make your message on the screen and all you spend is the cost of a local telephone charge," said Golom Pandiangan, a public relations staff member of PT Pos Indonesia.

PT Pos has suffered a loss in corporate income due to this decline. The state-owned company, however, was quick to diversify its business in anticipation of the trend. It set up its own Internet provider called Wasantara, which, according to Adang Supardi, Promotions Manager, almost succeeds in compensating for the loss incurred from the decline.

Now Wasantara serves 24,274 clients nationwide.

The mushrooming of Internet kiosks has caused further decline to post mailing. Teens who used to make up a significant part of the post mailing system, now flock to the warnet (an acronym for Internet kiosk) to have contact with their parents, other family members and friends.

Furthermore, the latest innovations in the cybernet world seem to be declaring the death of the postal era. With a capacity 2.4 giga hertz, a so-called wireless connection enables Internet users to have round-the-clock on-line contact with sites and their communication partners at cheaper costs.

And chatting over the Internet has its own excitement. "I meet my boyfriend very often. But chatting with him through e-mail makes our romance more colorful and beautiful," said Farida Ahyar, 18, a junior high school student.

A number of students said that the Internet helps them to make friends. "At first we just chatted on the screen. Later we made an appointment to meet directly," Farida said.

There is something that is gradually disappearing from the teen lifestyle as the Internet becomes more and more popular: the hobby of philately, or stamp-collecting, which seems to have been replaced with chatting on the screen and hours of surfing.

Farida said she used to be a stamp collector but she has left her hobby behind and become a regular surfer. "Surfing interesting sites is much more exciting than collecting stamps."

While the Internet has brought a great boom in communication, things are not always nice for the cyber-minded people here, especially when it comes to the condition of services in Indonesia.

Complaints are addressed to the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that merely strive to gain as many consumers as possible without paying attention to their service capacity. "Each time I try to make a connection from 11 p.m on, it will be damn hard to succeed. When it does, it will be terminated here and there. It is really frustrating," complained Suryana, an Internet user.

Netters accuse ISPs of not taking the line-customer ratio into account. And the complaints are also directed to the state telecommunication company. "The lines are terrible," another netter said.

Suryana said Indonesians deserve high quality telephone lines because local telephone charges in Indonesia are the highest in the world. "Singapore and Malaysia use a permanent charge for local telephone lines for unlimited use. It costs only Rp 120,000 if it was counted in rupiah," Suryana explained, adding that Internet services would not be able to perform well in a country where telephone usage is charged on a pulse basis.

The postal service in Indonesia still enjoys a huge market stake due to limited access to computers, especially in villages. Over the last three years, the access has even been reduced as Indonesia drowns in prolonged economic crisis that bring down purchasing power of many rural communities.

"Instead of spending millions of rupiah to buy a PC, I would rather use it to invest. The amount needed to buy a PC is enough for establishing my own business," said Mamad, a university student in the Bandung suburb of Cipatik.