As the first 5G operator in Indonesia, Telkomsel is committed to providing access to leading digital connectivity, which will encourage the opening of new opportunities and experiences. Nugroho, Director of Network at Telkomsel, talks about how Telkomsel is going to maximize the use of 5G through tapping both the B2C and B2B markets. Richard Liang, President Director of ZTE Indonesia, also shares his views on how ZTE can help Telkomsel in building a better 5G network. ZTE is a strategic partner of Telkomsel for 5G rollout.
In the coming years, how do you see 5G will grow, and how is Telkomsel's positioning contributing to the advancement of digital society in Indonesia?
Nugroho: Before answering that question, let me share some backgrounds about what's happened in the mobile communication market in Indonesia. The competition is getting fiercer and fiercer, but we believe that we will win the competition. Why? Simply because we are committed to becoming the leading technology player who provides the best consumer experience, and therefore we have managed to become the No. 1 5G operator in Indonesia.
Telkomsel 5G is already available in 9 cities in Indonesia and we are committed to expanding it further in the coming years. So, the first question is how we think it will grow. I believe as it happened elsewhere globally, it will also grow significantly in Indonesia be it in the B2C or B2B markets. In the B2C market, mostly it will be on the fixed wireless access or the enhanced mobile broadband market segments, while for B2B it will focus more on the industry revolution 4.0 solution, which will cover the industries such as mining, health industry, government, education, etc.
As mentioned before, we are going to have an aggressive expansion in both the B2C and B2B markets. For B2C we have a good plan to penetrate more into residential areas with our fixed wireless access, and we also have a unique value proposition in the market because we can deliver the best customer experience, for example, the throughput that we can achieve is up to 1 Gbps today. For B2B, it needs a better ecosystem. We cannot walk alone, we need to collaborate with all stakeholders. The ecosystem comprises of some components like educational institution, government or the industrial partners as well as our potential customers. As an example, we have some discussion with an educational institution to have their research report—what is the next priority that Indonesia needs, what the customers in this country need, so that we will collaborate using their knowledge and probably their available solution that we can integrate with our 5G technology. We also have some pilots in the manufacturing, mining industries and soon will have 5G implementation in the health industry. Another effort that we have spent is the collaboration with the government on how to make sure that all the devices related with 5G will be compatible with our networks because sometimes network technology is ready earlier than the market itself, and this needs a better alignment in the future. So, for example, if 5G is available today, it is supposed to be supported by the ecosystem like the devices the next day rather than one or two years later.
As the first 5G operator in Indonesia, what is Telkomsel's strategy on 5G network implementation, considering the current spectrum asset and upcoming spectrum allocation plan by the government?
The spectrum that we have today is simply enough, especially in the early stage of the 5G adoption in the country. Our first goal is to socialize this 5G technology—its benefits as well as the kind of problems that our customers can solve with this solution. There is no doubt that the 5G network that we have today is enough for that purpose, and we are going to have staged expansion based on customer needs. So, the first stage was for the socialization purpose, and in the second stage we would like to monetize. Looking into the trend of 5G in the fixed-mobile convergence market, we need to have a better proposition, and for that we will need more spectrum. With additional spectrum, we would like to have a better throughput, higher capacity and wider coverage of 5G with a cost effective investment on the per site basis.
We know 5G is a great technology to enable new service innovation. What kind of market segments do you think present the greatest potential opportunity to develop in Indonesia?
In general, market segments are always two, B2C or B2B, both of which have a great opportunity for Telkomsel to penetrate. For the B2C as I explained before, the focus will still be on the fixed wireless access as well as the enhanced mobile broadband. Let me give you some examples on the enhanced mobile broadband use case, when there is a gathering, big event, let's say, in the stadium, we used to have multiple BTSs to serve thousands or tens of thousands of customers in the same spot. With 5G, if it is already heavily adopted by the customers, we don’t need that much and we can still deliver a good customer experience, because 5G can simply deliver high throughput and high capacity in a very high density area. Even for journalists they can just simply do the live streaming using 5G in the middle of a big crowd, not like today.
For the B2B market, the focus will be on the industry revolution 4.0, which is about automation, about the zero-touch or humanless approach. And there are many examples from the mining, health and media industries, and what has been proven in the market today is similarly on the smart mining or health. Some mining companies have been adopting driverless truck operation. And we are now also doing the same pilot with one of the major mining companies in Indonesia. This will be our priority today, and later on we also would like to have a better collaboration to penetrate the health industry. The challenge in Indonesia is that while the population is spread all over the country, hospital is not available in some of the areas or villages, and to help that, automation and digitalization in the health industry is becoming more urgent. Therefore, soon we will have a trial for the remote surgery or remote inspection. For the remote observation, a very low latency is required, which can be solved by using 5G. Noted that the architecture in our solution has to adopt a standalone architecture instead of non-standalone architecture.
What is ZTE's plan to help Telkomsel build a cost-effective and profitable 5G network?
Richard Liang: Over the past few years, ZTE has established excellent cooperation and partnership with Telkomsel to prepare for 5G deployment. ZTE has products and solutions tailored to meet Telkomsel's 5G requirements and scenarios. We also provide Telkomsel with innovative and latest technologies, including compact, high-performance, and high-capacity products that support 2G/3G/4G/5G powered by the latest 7 nm chip, which deliver four times computing power and 30% less power consumption. In terms of the 5G business opportunity, ZTE always gives full support to Telkomsel in exploring 5G applications in vertical industries and moving towards digital transformation to achieve better technology performance and more significant business improvements.
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