Will we still need overland phone line in future?

Will we still need overland phone line in future?

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Even today, getting a new phone line from our PT
Telkom can be as difficult as giving the cat a full bath. The
installation cost may have dropped significantly in the past few
years and the services have improved a lot, but comparing the
quality and the availability of our telephone services with our
envied neighbor Singapore is like contrasting a bajaj motorized
pedicab and a BMW C1.

One of the biggest problems, in my opinion, is that Telkom
still works in the same old paradigm as the U.S. telephone
companies did more than a hundred years ago. They still seem to
follow the belief that there should be a line into every house to
carry the telephone signals back and forth to their network.
Building such a network has been, and will always be, capital as
well as manpower intensive, and covering the last mile to the
houses will always cost a fortune.

If you by any chance drop by my house, you will also be amazed
to see how the phone lines haphazardly cross each other along my
street, creating a perfect image of spider webs. With such a
higgledy-piggledy network construction, it's not surprising that
my phone line is never reliable. In fact, the loss of telephone
connection to my house was so frequent that I finally decided to
install a second line as a backup.

While PT Telkom and all its KSO partners in the five regional
divisions are busy installing more telephone lines in order to
meet the government's target of having 5 million lines by the end
of the current five-year development program, the ground may have
shifted. In advanced countries, more and more people now go
wireless. Eventually, the trend may make all the phone cables
hanging from the pole right in front of my house totally useless.

Last month's issue of the Tele.com magazine underscored the
fact that more people are now using their cellular phones than
their landline -- or wireline -- phones. In Western Europe, for
instance, where GSM is still predominant, making calls is easier
because the digital services are richer in features. Calls made
through the cellular networks still cost 200 percent to 700
percent more than the wireline networks, but the convenience of
the cell phones makes the difference worthwhile.

Frequently irritated by drivers who crawl along as they talk
on their cell phones? You do not have to go to Europe to find
people who talk more on their wireless phones than their wireline
ones. Almost everybody I meet carries a cell phone nowadays.

The problem with the original AMPS and the digital GSM
cellular technologies is that the number of subscribers that can
be served by a network is rather limited. A new technology called
Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, promises that operators
will be able to provide services to far more subscribers than the
analog AMPS or even the digital GSM using the same frequencies.

What makes CDMA capable of serving more subscribers using the
same amount of resources, which are those radio frequencies? One
of the most common examples used is a cocktail party where
everybody speaks at the same time using different languages. It
may be noisy, but you know that there are conversations going on.
Two or more people using the same language will be able to
understand each other against the background cacophony.

In the same manner, two parties using the same digital code
will be connected in a CDMA network where many other telephones
send and receive signals at the same time. Their opportunity is
not limited by the availability of the time slots, like in
networks based on Time Division Multiple Access.

There are other advantages, too, as Bintang Juliarso,
Qualcomm's regional manager for Southeast Asia, told me at his
newly opened office here one recent afternoon. Unlike in GSM and
AMPS networks, he said, the frequencies can be reused in nearby
albeit non-adjacent geographic cells. As the result, more
subscribers can be served in a given area as opposed to other
network technologies.

Qualcomm is the American company that was responsible for
making the technology, first used by the U.S. military, available
to the public.

Fixed Wireless

Based on the reports I have been following, it is clear that
wireless is the way we will communicate in the future, and the
future is coming fast. Qualcomm, for example, has the wireless
fixed telephone that you can install without the wait that is
typically Telkom's style. Fortunately, Telkom has approved the
use of CDMA, and this may mean that we may soon be able to use
wireless phones like the ones Bintang showed me in his office.

Wireless fixed telephones have been made available here by
Ratelindo, a subsidiary of Bakrie Brothers. Unfortunately,
Ratelindo's network uses the older Fixed Extended Time Division
Multiple Access (FE-TDMA) technology. While the quality of the
connection is adequate for ordinary voice communication and the
company's quality of service is improving, you cannot use the
line for data connection.

Ratelindo does offer a separate packet radio service that will
enable you to access Internet via RadNet at the speed of 19.2
Kbps. Increasing popularity of Ratelindo's services confirms my
belief that our telephones in the future will be wireless.

Today, with our telecom market still regulated, the cost of
making calls through a wireless phone is still far more expensive
than the cost of using the landline. But that will have to
change. Competition with other services, including the Personal
Handyphone Systems -- when they arrive -- will drive down the
cost to the customers significantly.

Besides, there are global services, such as Iridium, that can
connect your phones via one of its numerous low-orbit satellites
to any other telephone in the world. It is also becoming clear
that global networks such as Iridium were also built upon the
assumption that is no longer valid. Even now people can get
connected to almost anybody else in the world without having to
go satellite. The result is that Iridium will have to make its
services very, very low in order to attract users.

No, this is not going to happen overnight. But when the time
comes for Telkom to rip down the frightening phone cables
crisscrossing over the street in front of my house, I believe
that they will not be needed anymore. Besides, the coaxial cables
from the cable-TV provider -- when it becomes available in my
area -- will bring Internet-based telephone services into my
house and let me make international calls at a very low rate. In
the meantime, I may also have one or two other phone numbers
using the wireless network. And, hopefully, our
telecommunications authorities, too, will not as wireline-focused
as they are now.