YLKI strongly protests phone tariff increase

JAKARTA (JP): The Indonesian Consumers Foundation (YLKI) has strongly protested the government's decision to raise local and intercity telephone rates from yesterday.

The consumer protection foundation's vice chairman, Agus Pambagio, charged that the decision was based on certain parties' commercial interests and did not take the rising burden on consumers into account.

"The increase is unfair, because tariffs were increased in January and people are still suffering from the prolonged monetary crisis," Agus said, as quoted by Antara.

The Ministry of Tourism, Post and Telecommunications announced the decision to increase local phone rates by 10 percent for household subscribers and a maximum of 15 percent for business subscribers last month.

The government argued the increase was unavoidable if the publicly-listed PT Telkom was to remain in a healthy financial condition. The government also said that telephone rates here were among the lowest in the world.

PT Telkom holds a monopoly on domestic telephone services.

On Jan. 1, the government increased the local rate by 8.7 percent to Rp 125 per pulse, but cut intercity calls by 10.2 percent to Rp 97 per pulse. One pulse occurs every 1.5, two or three minutes, depending on the distance over which a phone call is made.

Agus acknowledged the steep depreciation of the rupiah against the U.S. dollar had also significantly reduced the real value of the tariff.

"However, the government is expected not to use the depreciation to justify the increases because people are currently troubled by sharply rising prices," Agus said.

Publicly-listed PT Indosat and PT Satelindo both raised international tariffs to 204 countries by 25 percent last month.

Agus said the government invited the foundation to attend a meeting to discuss the planned increase last month.

"We were ostensibly invited to give inputs, but in fact were simply asked to approve the decision," Agus said. (prb)