Indonesian Minister proposes new initiatives to stimulate Internet growth at ITU World 2006

Published by Divakar Goswami, Friday 7 December

The Indonesian Minister for Communication and Information Technology, Dr Sofyan Djalil, presented a number of new initiatives for removing the barriers to Internet growth in his country at a Forum at the ITU World 2006 event in Hong Kong on December 7, 2006.

Responding to a question posed by Divakar Goswami, LIRNEasia’s Director, Organizational and Projects, who was moderating the panel, Dr Djalil acknowledged that Internet penetration in Indonesia was currently very low and steps were needed to stimulate further growth.

He identified the lack of sufficient international bandwidth and submarine cable capacity landing into Indonesia as the biggest bottlenecks. According to him, the high price for international bandwidth was one of the factors that were preventing the Internet from taking off. In order to address the above bottlenecks, the Indonesian government was planning to open the international gateway to more players.

The new submarine cable providers would be encouraged to connect Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital to major destinations such as Hong Kong, Singapore etc that offer competitive bandwidth prices.

He also proposed to allow more backbone providers to build fiber optic networks within the country. He revived the idea of the Palapa Ring that was proposed in different forms over the last decade, to connect all the major cities in Indonesia. He however did not elaborate how such a project would be funded or whether it would be a purely Government initiative or a public-private partnership. In order to address low broadband penetration in Indonesia, the Minister informed the audience that a tender for broadband wireless in the 2.3 MHz frequency would be announced next week.