Syahrial Ali’s Blog

According to the latest data from DG Postel, the number of mobile prepaid subscribers in Indonesia have reached 117m on last July. If we calculate mobile phone density, then Indonesia with 240m populations has almost 50%  mobile phone density, a quite higher in number. However, the Sharing Vision surveys say that more and more people tend to have more than one mobile phone.

Actually there are at least 2 main reasons why people tend to have more than one mobile phone. The first reason is the tariff. Both GSM and CDMA have quite different tariffing scheme. People still feel that the GSM tariff is more expensive than CDMA tariff. Hence, everyone will have at least 1 GSM mobile and 1 CDMA mobile . GSM phone is used to receive a call and to maintain contact with other people. For your information, GSM technology is implemented earlier than CDMA in Indonesia, so that more people have GSM mobiles than CDMA mobiles. Meanwhile, CDMA is used to make a call because the tariff is so cheap.

Another important reason to have a second mobile phone is business related issue. When you have a business with one operator than operator will ask you to have that operator phone number. Their main argument for this is: You make a business with our operator, so that you have to use our network. Please imagine how many mobile phones you should have if you want to make business with all mobile telecommunication operators in Indonesia. Indonesia has 5 GSM & 3G operators and 6 CDMA operators.

Other reasons that people add other mobile phone are - to have better coverage, as a collection, and so on.

Then, we can conclude that Indonesia mobile density is far below 50%.