Unpaid cellular phone bills reach billions of rupiah
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)