Syahrial Ali's Blog

In the airline world, we knew budget airlines such as Valuair. It is a cheap airline company. The cheap airlines as such cut many costs from promotion fees, administrative costs and reduced several services. With such prices, the company still earns valuable profits.

A similar thing also happens in Indonesian telecommunication industry. Many cellular operators (both GSM and CDMA based technology) currently offer very cheap tariff for communication services (Value Communication/ Budget Communication). The tariff war is happening. They have changed the tariff regime that was initially based on the distance and time into flat tariff, one tariff for one call. They still distinguish the On-Net tariff (tariff inside their network) and the Off-Net tariff (tariff across networks).

Does the community get benefit with such condition? (more…)

Currently Indonesia has a massive development in cellular industry. The number of subscribers rise very sharply in the last 5 years. Since 2007, Indonesia has 11 cellular carriers with 2 based technology, GSM and CDMA. The GSM operators are: Indosat, Telkomsel, Excelcomindo Pratama, and two new operators HCPT (Hutchinson Charon Pokhand Telecommunication) and NTS (Natrindo Telekomunikasi Selular). All GSM operators also have 3G licenses. While, the CDMA operators are: Telkom (Flexi), Indosat (Starone), Mobile-8 (Fren), Bakrie (Esia), Sampoerna (Ceria) and the newest one Smart Telecom (Smart).

What do you think about this condition? Do we already have a sufficient number of telecommunication operators, or are they too few or too many?

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