Syahrial Ali's Blog

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?

Benchmark with other countries

If we compare this situation with our neighbor country, Malaysia for instance, they only have 3 cellular carriers (Digi, Maxis, Celcom) with GSM based technology along with 2 CDMA licenses for Telecom Malaysia. There are 2 new operators in 3G namely Time3G and U Mobile.

The similar thing also applied in Singapore. With almost 4 million populations, Singapore only has 3 cellular operators (SingTel, StarHub, MobileOne) with GSM based technology. No CDMA license is released.

Some people will see this as unbalance comparison. Both Malaysia and Singapore are small countries with few populations. An island country like Singapore is less than half Jakarta. We can agree with this argument. So, let’s choose India as the country for comparison.

Like Indonesia, India also released the license both for GSM dan CDMA based technology. India has 7 GSM operators and 8 CDMA operators. So India has more cellular operators than Indonesia.

If we compare the area and population between Indonesia and India, we may come to the conclusion that India should have many operators than Indonesia.

But wait please! All cellular operators in Indonesia have nationwide license, so they can deploy their network on all areas in the country. With this type of license, operators main targets are big cities where the money resides. Several years ago, there were several regional operators but today they have extended their license to be a nationwide operator.

How about India?

Most of operators in India only have regional licenses. Only 4 GSM based operator and 2 CDMA operators which have nationwide licenses. Please visit www.cdg.org and www.coai.in to get the detail data. With the above facts, can we come to a conclusion that Indonesia has too many cellular operators / carriers?

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