VoIP over Wireless Internet & Cellular

Onno W. Purbo

Today, as reported by Didin the board of director of INDOWLI Indonesian Wireless Internet http://www.indowli.or.id, there are 10.000+ Outdoor WiFi nodes installed all over Indonesia. The current 200-300 new installed nodes / month will increase significantly in 2005, as the government is committed to unlicensed the 2.4GHz band by 5 January 2005. No licensed necessary to use the band, though we may still need to pay the government for the right to use the frequency.

Today, as reported by Phoneselplus http://www.phoneselplus.com in its September 2004 edition and x-phones http://www.x-phones.com/www/as_detail.php?id=487 in October 2004 article, there are at least 20 million cellular user in Indonesia & it has been reconfirmed by the Indonesian Cellular Operator Association (ATSI) Secretary General Rudiantara. 

Data access over cellular (both CDMA and GSM) is normally traffic based and changed in the range of Rp. 5-15 / Kbyte. It is quite expensive for heavy Internet users. Several operators, namely, StarOne & Fren (Mobile-8) promote the use of flat rate unlimited data access at Rp. 200.000 / month.

Percentage of data access subscriber over cellular is varied. In Matrix (400.000 subscriber) is about 15%. In Excelcom (3.3 million subscriber) is only about 4% (120.000 data subscriber). Thus, a conservative Indonesian data access subscriber over cellular would be around 500-600.000 subscribers.

VoIP has been of interest for many Indonesians, the free Indonesian VoIP network, such as, VoIP Merdeka (H.323 based) and VoIP Rakyat http://www.voiprakyat.net (SIP based), is of interest for many Indonesia at hundreds of calls / day. Some of the cell subscribers are currently playing around with VoIP Merdeka or VoIP Rakyat. However, lack of ability to connect to PSTN due to legal framework has impeded its development.

Indonesian corporate are currently subscribe to VoIP service provided by XL (http://www.xl.co.id) or Pacific Satellite Nusantara (http://www.psn.co.id) as they have VoIP licensed and able to pass traffic to PSTN.