Unpaid cellular phone bills reach billions of rupiah

JAKARTA (JP): The amount of unpaid bills to the country's cellular telephone operators have reached billions of rupiah and the trend is increasing, a telecommunications executive said yesterday.

Garuda Sugardo, engineering director of PT Telkomsel, a global system for mobile communications (GSM) operator, said the unpaid bills had reached an alarming level and cellular operators should join hands to combat the bad debtors.

He said existing cellular operators could, for example, exchange lists of the bad debtors and jointly issue a blacklist for them.

"This will make operators more cautious in receiving new users. It's not impossible that the same people have cheated all cellular operators in Indonesia," he told reporters.

He said the rising amount of unpaid bills was partly due to sharp competition in the industry where every operator tried to offer "flexibility" to win new subscribers.

"Operators are a bit careless about possible administrative fraud. Certain people use fictitious names, addresses and other identities to get connections on their cellular phones. The people then make calls, mostly overseas and long-distance. The operators never know how to charge them and disconnect the phone while the people just disappear."

According to Garuda, Telkomsel is conducting a study of its 343,000 users.

"We are classifying the users into three categories: white, gray and black lists," he said.

This is important to prepare for the worst, he added.

He said there are 800,000 cellular users in Indonesia which apply three systems: GSM, AMPS and NMT.

"But we never know the real figure as there are many people subscribing more than one system and operator. It's also hard to estimate the value of unpaid billing, but it's about dozens of billions of rupiah."

New service

Telkomsel launched yesterday its newest feature which combines GSM and Internet services in cooperation with Meganet, a leading Internet provider in Indonesia.

The new service, called e.phone, offers six facilities, including e-mail to mobile phone, e-mail notification, phone to e-mail, phone to fax, phone to pager and phone to phone.

E-mail-to-phone service will allow people all over the world to send short messages to a mobile phone through the Internet. E- mail notification will let Telkomsel users know of any incoming e-mail messages.

Phone-to-e-mail service will allow Telkomsel users to send messages to the Internet through the phone without dialing to providers. Phone-to-fax will allow Telkomsel users to send a fax without any fixed telephone line or telecopier.

Phone-to-pager service will allow Telkomsel users to send messages to pager owners. Telkomsel has set up a cooperation with four pager operators, SkyTel, StarPage, MultiPage and Starko.

Phone-to-phone service will allow GSM users from three different operators -- Telkomsel, PT Satelindo and PT Excelcomindo -- to send and receive short messages to each other. (icn)