Heloise Emdon, Jakarta, 15 August 2003
Pragmatic innovation:
The day the lights went out from Ottawa to New York. Frank Tulus and myself found ourselves stuck in Jakarta traffic jams. It is not these traffic jams I will here describe, apart from mentioning the smoggy, pushy, hooting, humid, clamour of cars and mopeds, there is nothing remarkable about the Jakarta traffic jams: except the huge inadequacy of the infrastructure to carry the people.
It’s the other highway I want to tell you about: The more than 50 ISPs in Indonesia would not settle for the high cost of 2Mb lines that the Indonesian Telkom is selling them at Rupea 40million per year ($5m). In Indonesia we learn how the ISPs and the community have been pragmatic in “getting around” this high cost.
Nurlina, Onno’s wife who met us because he was on a “roadshow” in Bali, drops us near the high rise buildings in the Mampang district, a newer section of what seems to be downtown of sprawling Jakarta. We are closer to the JW Marriot that got bombed just two weeks earlier. It is hard to locate a downtown because even where these multinational towers scrape the sky, there are low-rise commercial and domestic buildings, a labyrinth of small streets that bottleneck into large intersections, and then dual carriages that cut between this planning stew with footbridges to cross over. Clearly some thoughtful planning did go into solving how to get people across the busy highways.
Frank and I walk across a footbridge spanning the dual carriage way, view the remains of an informal settlement that was moved from the area, drop down onto a dirt road track that leads to a small, unassuming road where the Indonesian Internet Exchange building stands. There are no serious security checks, or so it seems, we go up in a lift to the Apjii offices, the secretariat that serve all the Indonesian ISPs. Their offices are all located in this building. It is around lunchtime and the lift is loaded with young men, none of them a day over 30 years. I later discover that when the Indonesian government started licensing ISPs one of the conditions for registration was that the licensees be younger than 35 years. No one can explain why the government thought of this investment in the youth, but it has paid off in getting innovators to invest in Indonesia’s future. It seems, however, that the government stifles a lot of other innovation.
Demand for internet bandwith has increased dramatically, and could be ascribed to the both corporate and multimedia demand. Everyone is mum about the effect of VOIP on the system because of the telco’s monopoly on voice traffic, and despite magnitudes of compression available for VOIP, one must safely assume that in a country where there is less than 10% penetration of fixed lines, a total of 6 million fixed lines and 7 million GSM connections, the dramatic demand for data, around 1Gbps could be ascribed to at least some voice traffic.
When large ISPs experienced similar traffic problems, and Telkom would only commit a further 2Mbps if the ISP were to pay for the construction and terminal equipment at huge expense of $12 000 for installation and the further $40 000 per month, they agreed to establish a “carrier neutral data centre” to interconnect with each other at no cost. They located the ISPs servers, routers and switches on the same floor of the Elektrindo Building.
By this peering they were able to increase their shared bandwith. By physically locating each of the servers as well as all the access infrastructure such as the international gateway on these premises, the servers are peered running Ethernet cable between the peering ISPs in the same building so that they could run 100Mb Ethernet cables (which is restricted to 100m lengths) amongst the racks in the same building and so doing increasing the bandwidth they have available in their local peering point:.
http://www.apjii.org.id shows the following logical graphic of its peering point:
Since the peering point was established in 1999 the bandwidth demand has grown from:
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Based on the annual report of the Indonesian ISP Association (APJII) that can be downloaded from here, the estimated Internet users and subscribers up to the end of 2002 is as follows:
Subscribers Users
1998 134.000 512.000
1999 256.000 1.000.000
2000 400.000 1.900.000
2001 581.000 4.200.000
2002* 1.000.000 8.000.000
*Estimated up to the end of 2002
Table: Growth Indonesian Internet Subscribers and Users
Source: APJII (www.apjii.or.id)
From: Onno W Purbo,
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The Entrepreneur behind the “only physical” peering point Johar Alam, describes himself as a real-estate manager. The building we are in houses the physical peering point of all the ISPs, and once there the international gateway providers Indosat, and other satellite and cable service providers landed their ports into the same building, as did Telkom which provides the fibre into the rest of the Indonesian archipelago. However its service is not impressive: serving a mere 6 million of the 240 million Indonesian people. It is believed that 50 million Indonesians have never heard dial tone.
From his chapter in the “Digital Review: Asia Pacific” on Indonesia Onno Purbo reports that Indonesia, despite its capacity constraints, is using a peak of 1Gbps.
“As reported by Johar Alam, the administrator of Indonesian Internet Exchange, in the year 2002, the total IIX in country peak bandwidth is in access of 250Mbps. Since the international traffic is normally about three (3) times of local bandwidth, the peak Indonesian international bandwidth is estimated about 800Mbps. The peak bandwidth is normally about 80% of the maximum bandwidth. Thus, it is safe to estimate a maximum bandwidth of 1Gbps from Indonesia to the Internet The ratio of in-coming and out-going Internet traffic volume is about 1:10 as Indonesian is still consume more information rather than produce information.”
Battling for independent regulator
Ms Rahayu Juniarti Soehardo and Taru Wisnu show off the publications produced by Mastel, the Indonesian Infocom Society. Representative of all the service providers, the society is working hard at proposing policy on forming an independent regulator in Indonesia.
