Bali Expat Forum - Bali Travel Forum

Hi all, I've done a round up of Bali Internet Service Providers (ISPs). My place is on a hill in Jimbaran without phone lines so my focus is on the various wireless providers. Looks like Indosat's 3.5g or Blueline's service are the best bang for the buck based on my "pain index".

Click to Look at my Bali Broadband Roundup

Thanks nomad4ever for doing the first one

sud0n1m

Your Bali Broadband Roundup was both interesting and informative, up to a point.

Living up on The Bukit, can't you spend some time (and money) to get a telephone line? The current options you're considering are way too expensive for me, and anybody else, unless they have a lot of disposable money (= "rich").

I'm not sure about the other parts on that web-site...looks and sounds like a load of crap to me. Please excuse me if I'm sounding rude. Each to his own - if it works for you and your colleagues, good luck.

Your comparison table omitted quite a few other ISP's, like Centrin, Telkom, etc. I'm not sure that they offer anything 'better' or more 'competitive'.

For those who might be interested in all this, look for yourself at:

http://topstartup.com/2007/06/01/bali-b ... d-roundup/

The limited round-up is fine. Poke around a bit more and you might want to cut your typing fingers off.

The 3.5g technology will apparently go up to 40Mb/s (per cell).

If that is introduced in Bali and if it doesn't cost an arm and a leg it will be the ideal alternative to adsl.

Allan, If you please - could you explain in lay terms the 3.5g technology and is the fact of no quality cable to Indonesia the culprit of sloooooow speads?

Here is a breakdown of the "g" mobile phone system I found on the net:

1G was the old analogue system that was turned off a long time ago.
2G is the current digital system for making voice calls
2.5G is a little extra bolted on top of the 2G system to allow data to flow more quickly. It's usually refered to as GPRS.
3G is the newer mobile phone system for voice calls and video calls (also known as UMTS in the UK and various other places. This is why, on some phones the 3G symbol is a 'U').
3.5G is, again, a little technology bolted onto 3G that allows data to be moved more efficiently over a 3G network. It's called HSDPA but most refer to it as 3.5G

4g is being tested now and promises a seemingly incredible 100Mb/s outdoors and 1Gb/s indoors. 100 Mb/s would allow a reasonable quality movie file to be downloaded in less than a minute. Some companies are planning to roll it out as early as 2007/2008.

As for the lack of bandwidth in Indonesia the physical reason is the lack of communication cables into Indonesia and the slow rollout of last mile infrastructure. The logical reason is tied up with Indonesian domestic politics. PT Telkom and Indosat were given exclusive licenses by the Indonesian government for fixed telephony and international gateways, respectively. Monopolies have a natural tendency to under invest in infrastructure and keep prices high.

Telkom is investing in additional bandwidth as a partner in the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) submarine fibre optic cable project which will increase international bandwidth from 2.5Gb/s to 40Gb/s (although Telkom is already renting an additional 5Gb/s because of the demand for Speedy ADSL). The new cable is due to come online in 2008.

Domestic services and international bandwidth both have to improve before there will be anything like true broadband available in Indonesia. The good news is that new technology rollout just keeps getting faster. Over the next two to five years the average user should see big improvements.

I use 3.5g asurce whilst on the move and it report 400kbtes connection speed.

That's because your provider has limited your bandwidth. The current technical specification for 3.5g specifies a theoretical maximum 14.4Mb/s. Getting close to the theoretical maximum would depend on the number of users sharing a cell, the signal strength, signal quality and exactly which level of 3.5g service the provider is offering (3.5g offers 1.8 Mb/s, 3.6 Mb/s, 7.2 Mb/s and 14.4 Mb/s (download)).

If you are getting 400K BYTES/second that is equivalent to 4Mb/s which is excellent.

The updated version of HSDPA (the protocol used in 3.5g) will soon offer 42Mb/s. Of course you need a provider willing to provide it!

I visited Indosat today and they have a promo from 14 May to 31 December. Interesting for me as an existing Indosat Matrix user is that I can choose Paket 1. It's for the 1 GB p/month usage of 3,5G. You pay Rp. 130.000 p/month for the first 3 months and Rp. 200.000 for the following months after that. If you buy the USB modem from them (at Rp. 2.230.000) the first 3 months will be free of charge, meaning that the modem will actually cost Rp. 1.840.000. Calculated over a period of 12 months, the 3,5G use will cost an average of Rp. 300.000 p/month. Additionally they offer 5% discount on my handphone bill when the total amount is over Rp. 350.000 in a month.

This looked very attaractive to me, so the Indosat guys came to my house to test the coverage. But when they arrived the network was down....

They will come back tomorrow, but if it works fast, they will have me as a second customer!

Testing centrin 3g service:
I've recently signed up with centrin for unlimited email access with their promotional rate of around 260.000/month (with the one time subscription fee it came to a total of 313.000) than ran until may 31st - I don't now what the current rate is-. To this you have to add 950.000 for the data card/modem unless you already have a 3G phone with bluetooth capability that could then be used as a modem.
Centrin is using XL as their provider so you can check on XL website their 3G coverage for Bali. If there is no 3G coverage, you can still connect using XL GPRS network but at lower speed.
I've been using the service from Kerobokan with an average speed of around 50kbps but it's not a steady connection as it can drop to much lower speed probably depending on the traffic on the network; overall I would say that you get a slightly higher speed than using a fixed line Telkomnet connection which is a far cry from broadband access. I'm currently in Jakarta and I get the same speed, I was even able to connect from the car on my way from the airport which is a good way to kill time in the usual traffic jam...
Overall I must say that for an unlimited service, the price is decent -if you are more concerned about mobility than speed- and the people at Centrin in Denpassar are very helpfull. The only problem was that I had to wait around 10 days before the service was activated as they have to do that from Jakarta (don't ask me why).

Thanks for the info O.

I've been using the service from Kerobokan with an average speed of around 50kbps

I have been using Indosat 3G for a few days and the speed is excellent! The fastest I have ever had (in Bali) and definately faster than our adsl from Telkom Speedy that I use (alone, not shared) at the office. Very well suited for Skype with use of webcam, even with a signal strenght of 1 grade out of four.

Excellent news and thanks for the update Spitfire.

Considering it's five times cheaper I guess there are a few satellite companies watching their businesses evaporate right about now.

Allan wrote:Excellent news and thanks for the update Spitfire.

Considering it's five times cheaper I guess there are a few satellite companies watching their businesses evaporate right about now.

I just don't hope my neighbours are watching this and subscribe as well (would affect the speed)

This post is from my hotelroom in Jogyakarta using my 3G modem! Just to let you know that Indosat have made me happy again (and that'snot always the case with them...).

Ok.

Here is my problem with services like that.

Many people will use it, and unfortunately, will misuse it, intentionally or not.

I did a quick search on the IP address you used to post your last message.

This IP address is listed in a few spam databases, and therefore would not be very suitable for serious business use, its "contaminated".

This is also true for plenty of telkom dial up ip addresses. when I still used telkom, I often could not send emails, because the ip address was blacklisted somewhere.

Check if your IP is listed, here: http://www.spamhaus.org/

You will find that if you use a service that routes all traffic through one or a small set of IP addresses, or a limited set of ip addresses are assigned such as is the case with dial-up or something similar, those addresses soon get "contaminated".

This is because people are sending (email) spam, or people are infected with some virus that does it for them.

Even my sat service has problems with that. Although I have 4 private ip addresses, all my web browsing goes through a proxy, that I cannot turn off. Its also "contaminated".

Yes Bert, that's true! I have found out already because my wife's email was rejected by her company in Holland. Luckily in our case, we are at work during the day and are using it mainly for private reasons. But we'll see in the future what happens. I specifically asked Indosat if I would be stuck to a minimum time of supscription and that is not the case. So if I don't like it anymore, I cancel and have to try to sell my modem at the best price to cover the loss. As an alternative to this, I use Gmail to send urgent mails to recipents that filter me (while travelling) as I am now.

Still, for browsing and keeping in contact wit the friends and relatives this shouldn't be a problem right?

BTW: I had the "spam filter rejections" with other providers including Telkom Speedy as well. Isn't it an issue in general for Indonesian IP adresses? As long as illegal films, software, bags, clothes etc. are offered in shopping malls next to authentic brand outlets, it's likely to apply to malicious internet usage as well.