Syahrial Ali's Blog

When you travel abroad, you will receive a welcoming message in the destination port from another operator. This message will tell you that you can use your mobile phone in this country as if you are in your own country. You are currently in other country and the operator you use has a cooperation agreement with the local operator in the destination country. You are in international roaming condition.

The same principal can also be applied within the same country. Some operators have better coverage than some others, or some operators have coverage in one or more areas, while some others have coverage in that region but they don’t have in another region. To cover all regions, an operator shall need to make a domestic roaming agreement with other operators.

Up until October 2009, almost 15 years since GSM technology was launched in Indonesia, no cellular operator was interested in domestic roaming. Big operators seem reluctant to provide domestic roaming to its competitor. This is one reason why new entry in cellular industry get difficulties to attract more customer in Indonesia. New entry operators must built their own network to serve customers.

However on Nov 16th 2009, there is a breakthrough in cellular communication in Indonesia when XL agreed to provide national roaming for Axis. Hence Axis’s customer can make a communication in all over Indonesia even though Axis doe have network in that area.

Domestic roaming is beneficial for both parties. The main benefit goes to tenant (Axis), however XL also receives additional revenue from this service. Domestic roaming is enable new entry to attract many customers as it can serve wider coverage.

Special respect shall be given to XL management who opens up an healthy competition with their competitors. Congratulation.

Deregulation in telecommunication sector tends to encourage competition in multi-operator environment. The same phenomenon also happen in Indonesia. Currently there are 10 cellular operator with 12 types of services, namely 6 cellular services and 6 fixed wireless access services.

Indonesian big market has attracted many investors in telecommunication industry. According to the data from Directorate General of Post and Telecommunication, till the end of 2008, Indonesian mobile subscribers has reached 150 million. This is one of the magnet why the investors come to Indonesia.

The competition among mobile telecommunication operators have increased sharply which are supported by two main things namely the need for communication itself and the affordable tariff. In terms of communication need, mobile phone has become life style not only for high and medium class society but also for low class society. With regards to tariff, the tariff war among cellular operators has brought the tariff down to the lowest level. Moreover, currently there are many low cost handsets available in the market. With these things, the number of subscribers has sky rocketed.

Responding to the high competition, a control mechanism is released by telecommunication authority. To ensure that the competition is healthy and to protect the customers’ right, every telecommunication providers are obliged to provide a service within the standard quality of service. This rules is based on Minister Information and Communication decree no 12 in the year of 2008.

There are 4 main items in the Cellular Quality of Service Rule namely: Service Performance, Network Performance, Reporting, and Assessment, Reward & Punishment.

The service performance consists of billing complaint, other complaint, activation and customer care response. The billing complaint shall be less than 5% of the total complaint, and all complaint shall be resolved in 15 days. 98% of activation both for post and prepaid shall be finished in 24 hours. 85% of Customer complaints shall be finished in a year (this is to anticipate if most complaint happen at the end of the year). With regards to customer care, 75% of all calls to service center shall be picked up by operator in 30 seconds. The time is calculated after the caller presses a special digit which mean he/she wants to speak to operator.

In the network performance, the dropped call and blocked call rate shall be less than 10% from total calls. The test shall be done by drive test and static test with a minimum sample 260 and 200 calls respectively for each city/region. The call shall be 60 seconds holding time and 10 seconds pause time. In terms of short message service, 75% of the number of short message shall be sent at maximum 3 minutes. The total sample of SMS test is 100 messages with 160 characters long and the interval time to send the sms is 10 minutes.

The rule is also requested operators to report their quality of service performance, once a year. The report shall be submitted not late the second week of February. Besides that operator shall update and publish its quality of standard on quarterly bases in its own website.

To assess operators’ report, Indonesian Telecommunication Regulator performs quality of service measurement once a year. When the measurement result is not meet the rule criteria, a punishment such fine will be applied to the operator. The moral is the regulator wants to protect customers from bad service quality.