According to Fitch ratings agency, the picture is likely to look quite rosy. Subscriber numbers are expected to grow by 25 to 30 million this year, although it will not be the steepest annual growth the country has experienced. Other factors will help improve the landscape, as there is still plenty of room for growth in the broadband market. Indonesia’s Internet penetration is still less than one percent.
Ben Verwaayen, Alcatel-Lucent’s current CEO, seems to share this optimistic outlook on the country’s telecom industry.
“Telecom users in Indonesia are enjoying the lowest ARPU [average revenue per user] in the world. The growing middle class is tech-savvy, and Indonesians are known for their propensity to communicate,” he said during a limited media interview here in Jakarta last week. That is why Indonesia is an important market for his company.
During the interview, Verwaayen, who has lived — on and off — in Indonesia for many years, made a very important statement. He said every government had to decide whether it wanted to leverage telecommunications as a growth driver or a cash cow. Indonesia, according to him, has not really made up its mind yet, and this makes the country’s telecom environment one of the most challenging.
If telecommunications is to become one of the engines of economic growth, then the government should take steps that are more supportive to the industry. It should consider lowering the license fees for the use of frequencies and rates for interconnection.
Regulations should be made friendlier to the industry (unfortunately, Communication and Information Technology Minister Tifatul Sembiring’s recent demands from Research in Motion did not reflect a favorable stance toward the industry — and telecom users).
However during the interview, we did not touch upon Indonesia’s brawl with RIM. I, as well as the three other journalists from leading publications who were present during the interview, was more interested in what Alcatel-Lucent is doing in Indonesia and elsewhere and what its major contributions to the industry are.
The company, as stated by the affable CEO, is currently focusing on a couple of things including application enablement.
“If you can create open applications that operators can use, we will work together with the operators and provide the common platform for your applications,” he said. The investment would be the initial implementation, but the rest will be revenues.
One of the important contributions was the research done by Bell Labs published last October. The research, which involved 4,500 consumers and 850 enterprises in France, UK and Germany, pointed out that there is a strong demand for applications enabled by Long-Term Evolution (LTE). LTE is a wireless broadband technology designed to support roaming Internet access via cell phones and handheld devices.
Alcatel-Lucent has been an avid proponent of LTE. It is a strategic move, as devices such as the tablets and the smartphones’ demand for bandwidth continues to rise.
“As you can see, we now no longer communicate with words, we communicate with pictures and videos. We communicate through various sizes and types of screens,” Verwaayen said.
“Besides, we will soon have cloud services. Telecommunications will fulfill the delivery need,” he added.
By the way, Alcatel-Lucent is one of the world’s top telecommunications infrastructure vendors. In the past, it was the only vendor that had the three different types of communication technologies — satellite, terrestrial and submarine. It sold its satellite business a long time ago.
Other global players include Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Network, Huawei and ZTE. Competition between them and between the European and Chinese players, is fierce, because there is considerable overlap among their products and services.
Alcatel-Lucent’s projects encompass the whole lifecycle of a telecommunications network, starting from the preliminary network design phase and extending to the network dimensioning, architecture, deployment, planning and optimization, in addition to quality assessment and improvement and customer trainings.
The Paris-based company acquired Bell labs, the research arm of Lucent, when it merged with the latter four years ago. Today, the combined company serves both the operators and enterprises. It exited WiMAX two years ago and is now concentrating on LTE because, like most other global telecom vendors, it believes that LTE is the right option for the future.
The company is also strong in IP, thanks to the acquisition of Lucent and Bell Labs. “There is no question about it,” said the CEO, “the world has moved from analog to digital to IP.” In 2007, the company won a contract to provide VoIP for 1,600 users in the new terminal of the Dubai International Airport.
Apart from the airport project, which was won in 2007, Alcatel-Lucent has been busy with others such as the National Broadband Network rollout in Australia and 15 LTE trials across the Asia-Pacific region with operators including China Mobile, Singtel, Chunghwa Telecom and Maxis, it will be working with China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom to build fixed and mobile telecom networks.
Does he have any important message for Indonesia? Yes, he strongly believes that, given the tremendous potential it has, Indonesia should aspire to become a knowledge-based society and for that, its people must be connected.
“I think, for Indonesia, ICT is a massively important success factor. How can you be a knowledge-based society if you are not connected to the rest of the world,” he said.(C) thejakartapost.com
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