Jakarta Globe, Arman Dzidzovic, Jul 07, 2014
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| A man uses a cellphone as he sits in front of the Batavia Air office at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport outside Jakarta. (Reuters Photo/Beawiharta) |
It was all
black with a sleek curve to match the shape of your face as you talked, and a
smooth black cover which slid down to reveal a keypad to make a call. It felt
so futuristic that it was used in the first Matrix film, tech writer Aulia
Masna gleefully pointed out as he rehashed the memory of his first cellphone
back in 1996, the Nokia 8110.
“The screen
of the 8110 was tiny by today’s standards, but enough to show a single SMS
without having to scroll too much,” Aulia said.
Telecommunication
companies weathered a wobbly start due to rupiah inflation in the late ’90s,
but few could have imagined the immense growth of the industry in Indonesia.
The sector is about to hit its 20th birthday with three companies, Telkomsel,
XL Axiata and Indosat, maintaining a stranglehold on one of the world’s biggest
mobile phone and data markets.
Today, in
the world’s fourth most populous nation, there are more active mobile
subscriptions than people.
Connecting
an archipelago
Ten years
ago only two out of every 45 Indonesians had access to a fixed telephone,
according to Redwing Asia. Although cellphones and mobile networks were
available since the late ’80s, through the now defunct AMPS network, many
Indonesians living in rural areas had few methods of quick communication
available to them. Traditional letters and motorcycle couriers were still the
primary form of communication in the villages of Indonesia.
One of the
biggest hurdles phone companies had to overcome to connect the nation was
Indonesia’s unique geography.
“The
coverage requirements for operators in Indonesia are quite complex,” said Paul
Hemming, director of Redwing Asia, a company that analyses the technology
market in Asia. “There are over 17,000 islands, the nature of coverage is very
different from a country like America. The cost of operation is therefore
higher as well.”
Due to
Indonesia’s late entrance into mobile telecommunications coupled with a complex
geography, the industry skipped over an entire generation of landline phones
that usually make up traditional networks.
Indonesian
telecom companies found that laying down traditional copper telephone lines to
connect islands was too costly, so the industry jumped straight to building
mobile phone networks, Hemming said.
In a
country where there are still only nine million fixed phone lines, mobile phone
calls and SMS messaging are the dominant form of communication.
Amid the
first years of SMS messaging, Indonesian farmers found it to be an indispensable
tool for commerce. “They would compare prices at various markets over SMS and
ship their goods to the market that would give them the best return. A trading
community formed around messaging,” Hemming said.
Smartphone
syndrome
The dawn of
mobile connectivity that offered Internet access also brought the ascension of
smartphones in Indonesian culture.
“As for the
smartphone revolution, the answer is pretty easy: it was BlackBerry that
kick-started the entire thing,” Aulia said. “The BlackBerry was the status
symbol for the haves, never mind that they could only use it for voice calls
and SMS due to the non-existence of BlackBerry data plans.”
BlackBerry,
once a giant in the smartphone industry, has fallen on hard times as CEOs have
departed and profits fall. After years of neglecting its overwhelming
popularity in Indonesia, to the point where the Indonesian government
threatened to levy sanctions after an outage that left Indonesian BlackBerry
Messenger users fuming in 2013, Blackberry is looking to capitalize on its
South Asian popularity.
The
Jakarta, as it’s been nicknamed, officially the Z3, is the first ever
smartphone targeted at the Indonesian market by a major mobile phone maker.
Retailing at Rp 2.2 million ($185), the Jakarta phone is hoping to undercut the
competition while capitalizing on its strong brand to help BlackBerry get back
in the black. “It’s a last-ditch effort for BlackBerry,” Hemming said.
In
laser-lit clubs where young Indonesians flock to flaunt their wealth, like the
glitzy Dragonfly club in Jakarta, the gold-tinged iPhone 5S is the ultimate
status symbol. The latest and greatest model of the iPhone costs more than
twice the average monthly office worker’s salary.
“In the
past a young adult starting to smoke was a symbol of adulthood; now owning a
smartphone is more of a symbol than smoking,” Hemming said. “People will go to
great lengths to get the latest and greatest smartphones, they make sacrifices
in terms of clothing, cigarettes and transportation.”
Indonesians
have even christened the smartphone phenomenon with it’s own slang: gengsi , a
word that describes someone who needs to own the latest gadget at all costs and
be able to flaunt it.
Social
phenomenon
While the
rise of smartphones in Indonesia has left some with an unsavory materialistic
aftertaste, they have helped to boost the nation’s standing.
Jakarta is
the world capital of Twitter — no other city is more active on the social media
platform. The nation’s capital makes up 2.4 percent of Twitter’s entire
traffic.
“We can see
more opinions, the news is available to everyone now. It feels more open,” said
Adi, a political science student at a recent presidential debate.
Twitter is
one of the main sources of news for Adi, who works as an organizer for the Joko
Widodo-Jusuf Kalla presidential campaign. Many students and young Indonesians
like Adi learn about breaking political developments from Twitter, such as the
controversy that followed presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto retweeting a campaign
video by rocker Ahmad Dhani featuring Nazi symbolism.
Path, now
part-owned by a local firm, is one of the biggest social networks in Indonesia.
Combining aspects of Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, over four million
Indonesian users are on the network. But with so many photos, videos and
statuses being shared through the application, Indonesia’s aging 3G networks
are feeling the strain.
The latest
4G LTE coverage in Indonesia was finally launched last year by wireless
Internet provider BOLT, but it has yet to bring relief to smartphone users as
the service is only available in Jakarta and most users never achieve speeds
higher than on 3G networks.
The
nation’s appetite for social media has left many feeling disconnected from one
another. Indonesians on average spend about nine hours a day viewing one or
more screens like TVs, smartphones, computers and tablets. That’s the highest
in the world, according to Redwing Asia.
“The
discussion is what’s important,” said Adi of the new interconnectedness.
“It’s more
important now because of the election but also because we never had a chance to
do this before.”
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