Syahrial Ali's Blog

A shocking news released by Qualcomm last November when the company decided to stop the UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband) development. The company will now focus on developing Long Term Evolution (LTE) based platforms – which has been backed by the majority of WCDMA based mobile operators as their network upgrade path.

Previously Qualcomm is one of the competing participant in 4G technology development by using its own product, UMB. When they stop the UMB, the race down to LTE and WiMAX. In this race, WiMAX is ahead in the market as several countries have launched their WiMAX systems while LTE is still under trial. LTE will be in commercial in 2009.

As a supporter, Qualcomm is really serious with LTE. They have planned to start sampling multi-mode chips including LTE in the second quarter of 2009. Then, the competition for 4G service is getting high.

Since last year we have had lot of issues concerning WiMAX in Indonesia. Firstly concerning the licenses. Previously, the licenses will be released last year (2007), then postpone to February this year and up until now there is no news on when the WiMAX licenses will be released.

Several sources said that the delay in licensed release is on purpose to give time to the local industry to prepare everything to be able to compete with international manufacturers. In terms of empowering local industries no one will argue it. However, these industries shall be given a time limit so that they have to be ready on scheduled time. If they fail, regulator shall have an alternate plan.

Secondly, on May this year, an Indonesian WiMAX Chip has been launched. Currently they are on production phase. Thanks to Trio Adiono and team who make us proud as Indonesian.  The successful development shall be supported to be successful in market.

Meanwhile, Telkomsel, a giant GSM/3G Indonesian operator has made trial WiMAX technology in their network. WiMAX is used for backhaul only, to transmit signal from core network to Femto BTS point to multipoint. This is not for commercial purpose, said Yoseph Garo Vice President Technology and Business Incubation. He continued that Telkomsel has chosen LTE as its next technology.

When will WiMAX be implemented in Indonesia? WiMAX is considered to be able to overcome digital divide in Indonesia. WiMAX can be implemented with very low cost compared to current system but with higher capabilities and features. We still have to wait.

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.