I have a suspicion that if I go to the local Telekomsel orifice they would have no clue what I'm on about - been there before and they are lovely people and ever so helpful but not much idea about anything.
Markit,
I figure we've both been around here long enough to not be surprised about that. You will find no answers in an orifice or from their service guys who call at your place, last one we had in over Sanur when the ADSL was playing up did not know where the phone line went let alone what a phone exchange was when asked how long the ADSL phone line was. He did however know was how to program a replacement modem he had with him at a premium price, and I cant fault the old one then or now but after he called both work fine...Wonders of the world!...
What I did was a bit of "war driving" as the wifi guys call it. Stick a thumb stick modem in a lappy and drive around the district while monitoring the connection mode and testing the speed. These thumb stick modems have a program in them they install which shows the connection status and a code for the tower you are connected to. Quite often they will show "edge" "wdcma" which is not the supposed 7gbts connection they advertise as the normal, for that it needs to be "HSPDA". i can only suggest take a drive an sus out the district where you might get a signal from if you sent some one up your palm tree and install an antennae on a bit of pipe in the top.
I found while traveling between our pads in Sanur and Seririt (yes lucky not confused) with a lappy, the mode and thus capacity of the towers varied all along the way regardless of signal strength. As I understand it a tower providing edge only does the old GPRS at 9600 bd, if the modem is not forced to HSPDA only it can jump from one weak HSPDA tower and back to a strong edge tower causing lousy results and the user is none the wiser as to why.
I can say from observations on Telkomsel, there are lots of towers around Seririt but right now only the one in the centre of town has the HSPDA. I suspect its the only one hooked to the fibre and Alampura district might be a similar situation.
The ultimate bummer is a HSPDA tower with a lousy backbone capacity. I think this is because a tower in a major town is on the fibre network, then they use little microwave links that jump from tower to tower to hook ones further out back the network. Get on the end of this setup and its not much chop because these days every kid in the kampong has an internet empowered phone at 4pm when schools out.
Not always a cheap solution, in our case we spent 20+jt on a 30 mtr tower to clear our teak trees and the crest of the hill to make the 7km link to the HSPDA tower in Seririt rather than the local edge tower. Maybe next year the local tower gets upgrades and our 30mtr tower is for nothing, so it goes in Bali..
Yes beer normally cold as well to but if not there's always a crate of warm on the ready, but I have met some untrustworthy buggers with beer!!