LIVE FROM LTE ASIA, SINGAPORE: Operators across Asia have been touting their 4G achievements, with regular progress updates on base station rollouts and subscriber milestones, but as they shift away from dense urban areas they won’t be able to go it alone.

That was the message from a panel discussion yesterday at the event. Celcom CFO TVT Chari said that expanding passive network sharing, and moving to active sharing, will be essential for operators as they push 4G beyond the low-hanging fruit in major cities.

Bolt Super 4G CTO Devid Gubiani agreed, noting that sharing will be required given the huge investments to go nationwide. “I think we’ll go more to a joint approach to infrastructure sharing.”

Bolt introduced Indonesia’s first 4G service in Jakarta in early 2014 and in Q3 had 39 per cent of the country’s 4G connections. That share is dropping quickly as the other four major players have started to roll out 4G. Bolt has over 1.5 million 4G connections, with about half of those being smartphone users, according to GSMA Intelligence.

He said Bolt launched LTE-Advanced with carrier aggregation to give the user a more consistent experience. While the speed almost doubles, he said the capacity increases three times. “So the user is in a much better radio environment and can get more speed. In a prepaid environment it’s all about how many gigabytes you can download.”

Creating that environment for the user will keep it busy for the next two to three years, he said. It recently launched 4G service in the city of Medan on Sumatra.

Indonesian 4G
Gubiani said 75 per cent of Indonesia’s total mobile connections are still 2G, with 95 per cent of the country’s 4G users in Jakarta.

Telkomsel VP of LTE Lindayanti Harjono said that 58 per cent of its net LTE additions in Indonesia are customers poached from rivals, with the remainder coming from upgrades.

After initially starting to deploy 4G on the 900MHz band in December, it has followed up by rolling out on the 1.8GHz band over the past few months. It had less than one million 4G connections at the end of Q3. It is the market leader with 146 million total connections.

Harjono said its digital service revenue increased 44 per cent in H1.