Syahrial Ali's Blog

In the mids of July 2008, DG Postel and Indonesian Telecommunication Regulatory Body have validated the mobile prepaid subscribers data. This activity is done regularly in order to warn the operators to remove invalid subscribers’ data. During the investigation, the team found out several valuable information.

The first one is the number of Indonesian mobile prepaid subscribers has reached 117m, which consists of 102m GSM based subscribers and 15m of CDMA based subscribers. This figures is far higher than the similar checking on last March. At that time, the total prepaid subscribers were only 105m. So, in 3 month times the subcribers is up by 11%.

Secondly, Telkomsel is still the highest number of prepaid subscribers. They has 50.5m prepaid subscirbers, almost 43% of total market, or equal to 50% total GSM based market. Indosat placed in 2nd with 25.75m and Excelcomindo in the 3rd with 22m prepaid subscribers. Next is Telkom Flexi (FWA) 6.7m with its CMDA based technology, Bakrietel (FWA CDMA) with 4.4m, Mobile-8 (Cellular CDMA) 3.7m, HCPT (GSM) 3.2m, StarOne Indosat (FWA CDMA) 0.7m, Axis (GSM) 0.6m, Smart Telecom 0.5m and Sampoerna (CDMA) 0.45m

Although Telkomsel has the highest number of subscribers, they have the most invalid customers data. Out of 50.5m, only 5.7m were valid (11.5%), far below Indosat 22m out of 25m (86%) and Excelcom with 13.4m (61%).

During the period, XL subscribers increased extreemly from just 15m into above 22m (50%), while Telkomsel rose just above 10% . In CDMA operators, Mobile-8 subscribers rose from 3m to 3.7m (25%), while Telkom flexi subscribers grew for about 10%.

Telco observers said that the new interconnection tariff result in an increasing number of mobile subscribers. We hope that the increasing number of mobile subscribers do not reduce their service quality.