Three cellular operators plan to merge this year
Three cellular operators plan to merge this year
JAKARTA (JP): Three local cellular operators -- PT Komunikasi
Selular Indonesia (Komselindo), PT Metrosel and PT Telesera --
are planning a merger this year in a bid to increase efficiency
and provide better service to customers.
Komselindo's director of operations, Bambang Soesijanto, said
a merger of the three companies, which operate the Advanced
Mobile Phone System (AMPS), would greatly benefit customers as
they would no longer have to switch networks as they moved across
Indonesia.
"It would also mean only one overhead cost for us instead of
three, and the development of products could be integrated
instead of each of us developing different products," he said
over the weekend.
He declined to say exactly when the merger would take place,
but said he expected it would happen before the end of this year.
The merger would bring together three companies that own
regional licenses, forming them into one large national company.
Komselindo owns operating licenses for northern Sumatra, West
Sumatra, West Java, Jakarta and Sulawesi. Metrosel for Central
Java, East Java, Maluku and Irian Jaya, and Telesera operates in
southern Sumatra, Kalimantan, Bali and East Nusa Tenggara.
An existing agreement between the three operators allows
customers of one operator to use the networks of the other two
operators when the former's network is unavailable, Bambang said,
adding that for the service customers were charged a roaming fee.
"(After the merger) billing will be a lot simpler and a lot
cheaper," he said.
Bambang said a special team comprising representatives of the
three companies were currently calculating the cost of the
merger.
Also under calculation is the capacity needed to launch the
new service under a new banner, as it is expected to attract a
lot more subscribers, he said.
Ideally it should be capable of servicing between 750,000 and
one million subscribers, Bambang said.
Komselindo has about 70,000 subscribers, Telesera about 15,000
and Metrosel about 50,000 subscribers, he said.
Bambang also said the three operators would shift their
services from AMPS to the more advanced Code Division Multiple
Access (CDMA) system at 800 Megahertz.
He said the shift was to ensure customers were provided with
the latest technology and to give the companies a competitive
edge with operators of the Global System for Mobile
Communications (GSM), currently the most popular network in the
world.
"GSM may be ahead in the voice market, but for data CDMA is
leading," Bambang said, explaining that the cellular trend was
increasingly shifting toward high-speed data transmission, which
CDMA provides.
The CDMA technology can transmit data at 14.4 kilobits per
second compared to GSM at 9.6 kilobits per second, he said. (tnt)