Randomness Thing

To those sceptic people who thinks that Indonesia’s internet can’t grow rapidly, think again. SMART telecom arrives and offers cheap internet capability with a good offer of speed. It is JUMP, their new launched product that offers the customers a cheap internet provider.

I recently got this news from Mohank (or Henry Kho, my classmate) who said that I should try to change my ISP from Speedy Telkom to SMART Telecom. Another friend, Adrian Khrisna, said that he got a decent 1 Mbps from this particular ISP. So, I interested and tried to subscribe it.

It turns out that the deadline of this product is on March 31st 2009 and you have to make an initial contract of 12 months to subscribe. So, in other words you have to agree to contract this ISP for 12 months by paying them all the charges for all the months. That means, I have to pay Rp 189,000 x 12 to get the modem. Plus, the registration is an excrutiating process. I came to one of the galleries in BSD City and the people there are poorly trained. It took for almost 4 hours to complete the registration and they were constantly asking their superior how to get things done.

Well, it’s a normal occurrence since this ISP is considered to be new, so you have to expect some lackluster service in some aspects. So, after 4 hours waiting in agony, I got myself the modem and try it out the speed at SpeedTest. Here’s what I’ve got:

Not bad right? Considering that most ISP offers only 265 Kbps in Indonesia (don’t compare it to Europe or the USA, we are still newborn in internet service providing). The brochure said that the maximum download speed can reach up to 3.1 Mbps, so this 0.81 Mbps means that the connection is shared among users. It’s a decent speed for direct downloading and most of the time I got a speed above 150 KB/s. Watching YouTube is now a swift process, as I don’t have to wait for long time to complete the buffering process.

However, they seems to block ports for peer-to-peer downloading since whenever I use Bittorent, it has a slow speed since the seeds that can be collected are not much (I tried to do Port Forwarding but to no avail). I’m not sure if the problem is with the ISP or it is just me so maybe for those who use this ISP can update me on this issue. Another issue is since this ISP uses shared connection, don’t bother download using file hosting site such as Rapidshare or Megaupload, since you shared the free quota among other users. You have to buy yourself a premium account if you want to use this account. Anyway, this ISP is another solution to those ridiculously expensive ISPs. I’m going to end my subscription with Speedy Telkom, haha.

In the end, the arrival of SMART Telecom is a good thing for internet competition. FirstMedia has brought the competition and made Speedy Telkom reconsider their price. Now, SMART Telecom has arrived and offers a decent competition. This will force other ISPs to lower their price or improve their connection speed to win the competition. I’m very optimistic that the growth of internet service providing will go to a rapid stage the same as mobile phone operators have grown.