While internet access in Bali is still some way behind the broadband service found in more developed countries, in terms of speed and cost, you can now download media content at relatively high speeds. More and more people are getting high speed internet access in their homes and wifi has made huge leaps forward in the last couple of years. Most companies can provide customers with a router in their home that allows wifi access.
So how can we expect things to develop over the next five years? This will happen as fibre-optic technologies take over from the satellite services that most ISPs provide. The cost to transmit via satellite here in Bali is about 10 times more than what a normal ISP in Singapore pays for their connection.

What this really means is that Bali’s – indeed Indonesia’s – connection with the rest of the world is still pretty limited. The Indonesian government is keen to find an investor willing to build a ‘fibreoptic’ backbone stretching across the archipelago, but it would be a huge and costly undertaking. “I’d estimate the cost to be around US$ 1 billion and you’re talking about something like 15000 miles of cable.”

Access would also be a major issue – obtaining licenses from a bewildering array of landowners across countless islands could prove a bureaucratic nightmare. Which is basically to say, it isn’t likely to happen any time soon. Still, there are fibre optic connections to Singapore and as the user base expands, hopefully so too will the infrastructure to support it. “It may be more realistic to create a limited network that runs from Bali through Jakarta, Sumatra, Batam right up to Singapore,” suggests Gustave.
Telecom company Indosat recently launched High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) services in Surabaya and Jakarta, with plans to add a further eight cities in early 2007. It’s hoped that Bali will also come online in 2007, though the infrastructure is still being put into place. HSDPA is one of the most popular 3G protocols, allowing data transfer at very high speeds – up to 700kbps, though this would be somewhat lower during peak periods since the broadband is shared.

High speed dial ups like Telkom Speedy (which uses Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line ADSL) can be effective, but suffer here in Bali because so much of the traffic is international. While some companies advertise speeds of 384kbps, at peak times it can run very slowly because you’re sharing bandwidth with so many other customers.

As more and more customers start relying on the internet, infrastructure will necessarily adjust to accommodate them. Hopefully too, as democracy continues to take hold in Indonesia, foreign investors will be more encouraged to take up big projects here. In the meantime, the surfing is still pretty good. JD.

Alternative dialup connection on the island