Syahrial Ali’s Blog

As written in the previous posting, currently Indonesia has 11 cellular operators, where five of them use GSM based technology, while the other six use CDMA based technology. If in the previous posting, I questioned the number of operators that are too many, in this posting I will show the competition on both technologies (GSM and CDMA) in Indonesia.

Firstly, I want to explore the frequency bandwidth of each operator. You can find out the detail in the table below.

Frequency Band of Each Operators

If we inspect the data in detail we will find out that GSM operator has wider frequency band than CDMA operator. Every GSM operator has at least 10 MHz, while CDMA operator on the other hand has less than 8 MHz in its maximum frequency band. Some GSM operators have 30 MHz frequency band, while most CDMA operators only have 5MHz.

What is the impact of this bandwidth?

GSM Operators which also have 3G licenses have many freedom in designing their network. With such wide spectrum they can optimize their network so that their investment can be lower. CDMA operators on the other hand shall develop their network very hard in order to have good coverage and capacity. Hence, they need to build many BTSs, and thus their investment will be higher than GSM operator. This comparison is applied in order to serve the same region and same numbers of subscribers.

Next, let’s look at the number of subscribers of each technology.

“Bisnis Indonesia” Daily on April 16, 2008 wrote the number of active subscribers for each operator. It was clearly showed that the number of subscriber of each CDMA operator were still below 10 millions, while two biggest GSM operators have more than 50 million subscribers.

Is it a balanced competition? You are the judge.

Starting from April 1st, 2008 a new interconnection tariff applied. Actually the infocom Minister, Mohammad Nuh has been made a press release on Monday February 4h, 2008 to explain about this.

If we carefully study the new tariff we will find that most of the tariffs descend significantly. All interconnection tariffs related with cellular services decrease variably. However, the originating and terminating interconnection tariff from fixed or FWA (fixed wireless access) such as Flexi, Esia and Startone, have several variations, some are going down while some other are going up.

Only these tariffs are going up: Fixed or FWA originated from or terminated to: mobile, VoIP, Sattelite and International.

We hope that the telecommunication tariff will also descend very soon. I just read the ad in Kompas daily today that Telkomsel just released their new tariff scheme which are cheaper than before. Other operators will follow.

For those who wants detail interconnection tariff can visit BRTI website. You can find its link here.