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.