Bali internet update

Andi Haswidi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The country’s telecommunications authorities, as well as major players in the industry, expect it to take between two and four weeks for Internet capacity to recover after it dropped to 17 percent Tuesday following the Taiwan earthquake.

“The question of when Internet connections will recover, regretfully, lies in the hands of external parties,” Basuki Yusuf Iskandar, the director general of posts and telecommunication at the Communications and Information Ministry, said Thursday during a press conference.

“The repair work is expected to take between two weeks and one month,” he said.

Indonesia’s Internet connections were disrupted as a result of Tuesday’s 7.2-on-the-Richter-scale earthquake in Taiwan, which damaged undersea cables, and in turn disrupted Internet and telephone services across Asia after connections to main servers in the U.S. were severed.

“There are no disruptions within the domestic system, and connections from Indonesia to Singapore, to Malaysia and to Hong Kong are OK. It was the link from Hong Kong to the U.S. through Taiwan that was severed, as well as a link from China to the U.S.,” he explained.

“This incident is a major problem for us. But I can assure you that no crucial international business transactions have been disrupted as most big financial institutions, such as banks, use separate connections.”

Even so, Basuki admitted that there would be significant losses as other kinds of financial transactions that used the Internet would be unable to be carried out for the next few weeks.

“The total value of transactions via the Internet amounts to trillions of rupiah every month. So you can guess just how big the losses will be.”

Basuki said that his directorate general and telecommunications operators would now prioritize the use of available capacity for state security traffic and important financial transactions.

Besides the efforts to repair connections, Basuki said that attempts were also being made to reroute connections. “The options include rerouting to Europe’s or Australia’s telecommunications network. Europe would actually be our best bet as it has a bigger capacity.”

Availing of idle capacity in one of Indonesia’s satellites was another option.

“We do have some idle capacity in one of our satellites. We will use that. But we are also looking into renting connections to international satellites. The problem with satellites is that one connection will only improve the existing capacity by 10 percent,” he said.

Responding to a question on the current prohibition on local operators renting connections from international providers, Basuki said he would waive this as the current situation was an emergency.

Three of the country’s major telecommunications providers, PT Telkom, PT Indosat and PT Excelcomindo, have stated their willingness to charge Internet users less than would normally be the case.

Indonesian Internet Providers Association (APJII) chairwoman Sylvia W. Sumarlin, who was also present at the press conference, said that satellite connection tariffs for one gigabyte per month were between Rp 25 million and Rp 30 million.

Meanwhile, in Bandung, the disruption to Internet connections has left many internet kiosks in the West Java capital bereft of customers.