Indonesia Cellular Tariff

Indonesia is very strategic country for any purpose, huge market place for other country to market their products, and unlimited of natural resources potential from mining, plantation, and fishery. as it grow, there's more and more people need telecommunication, wired and wireless.

Since first time introduced in Indonesia, cellular network has become vital sector that related to most people daily activity. First established cellular network company is Satelindo (now had merged to Indosat). Later, until now there are Telkomsel, Indosat, XL, Hutchison established their service in Indonesia respectively with GSM platform.

While most of existing GSM user complaining the heaven-like GSM tariff, government policy approve another platform license to operate in Indonesia, CDMA, specialized for local (regional) connection only and at low-end tariff. But this policy does not work, as now GSM and CDMA as some CDMA company also operating nation-wide and with GSM-style dial number, where CDMA supposed to use only local-style number, like 021-XXX for Jakarta and 031-XXX for Surabaya. So, these companies are now head-to-head competing for larger market share. But actually some of it are same company that owned major GSM network, such as Telkom Flexi (own by Telkom, also has share on Telkomsel), StarOne (owned by Indosat), Mobile 8, Esia (Bakrie Telecom) and new comer SMART Telecom & Sampoerna Telecom Indonesia.

As the competition war is on, but binded to government regulation on Interconnection tariff (Dirjen Postel, DepkomInfo), all the provider can only "play" on intra-network calls. There are some offered Rp. 10/second, Rp. 1/second, and Rp. 1/minute for voice calls. Some provider offer even 0 (yes Zero cost) for these kind of calls/sms during off peak hours. In this situation of course the larger network subscriber share gain more advantages. Means when provider T with 60% market share has promted Rp. 10/seconds, mean it's subscriber will be able to call to 60% of cellular user with that cost. Compare to these even set Rp. 1/minute, but only have 1% market share. What I'm trying to say is, somehow this kind of promotion is just not appropriate neither effective.

As cellular user need grows, the demand for data calls is rising. But none provider has offered a significant tariff reduction for data. Without these incentive, the main objective to launch 3G (and HSDPA) will need more time to penetrate. We're not talking about speed, neither corporate user where cost is not in consideration list. We are talking about majority user, middle-class user (like me), and I believe this is the biggest portion of user segment.

For me, with current need and price scheme, GPRS is more than enough. And what ever the promotion, I'll still loyal to my number, current provider, "S" from company "T" since the first time I use cellular phone, eight years ago.

Glossary
GSM : Global System for Mobile Communications
CDMA : Code Division Multiple Access
GPRS : General Packet Radio Services
HSDPA : High-Speed Downlink Packet Access