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What If No Telco Necessary?

A first person account of how a jobless Indonesian ICT Evangelist dreams to see knowledge based society in Indonesia

By Onno W. Purbo

WHAT IF no Telco is necessary? What if no government & world bank involvement necessary in the development & building of an infrastructure in developing countries? What if it costs only 50 cents/students/month to get such infrastructure for schools in developing countries?

Sounds like a dream for those who live in any development countries like I do in Indonesia. Fortunately, in reality, it can be easily done. It is not the equipment, nor the  regulation, nor the investment that counts, it is the ability to educate critical mass that gain the required information & knowledge critical to the establishment of such infrastructure.

It seems the traditional Telco & the Indonesian government believes that any ICT infrastructure required a highly skilled & trained personal to run expensive sophisticated equipments that can only be funded by multi-national investors. Such believe highly imbedded into all legal and policy framework within the Indonesian telecommunication industry.

Let’s have a closer look at ICT technology development; one can easily notice few important features of any ICT technology. It gets more powerful, much smarter, more speed, more space in the memory. Fortunately, all those advanced features can be obtained at much lower costs, much easier to use, to configure, to control, and, thus, more user-friendly.

The consequence is quite dramatic. The required infrastructure investment may be drastically reduced to a level affordable for a household or community to build and operate their own infrastructure. Not surprising to see a common people with slight technical skill operates the infrastructure.

It enables a community based telecommunication infrastructure that builds by the people, run by the people, for the people, a totally different concept & significant paradigm shift as compared to the traditional telecommunication infrastructure, which normally licensed by the government, build and run by the telecomm operators, for the subscriber / people. Unfortunately, most telecomm policy and regulations, at least the one in Indonesia, cannot easily adapt to such paradigm shift.

After seven (7) years trying to educate the Indonesian government on a concept of community based infrastructure, it was partially written in some sections within the Indonesian National Information Infrastructure concept known as Nusantara 21 in 1996. A concept which then sold to the World Bank to loan US$34,5 million in November 1997 that resulting nothing but mostly impractical policy regulatory papers & lack of funding for most implementations.

Fed up & quit as civil servant in February 2000, I am dedicating myself as IT writer & delivering ICT knowledge to Indonesian in various media, such as, CD-ROM, web, books, talk show, seminars, workshops as well as answering e-mail in 100+ Internet mailing lists. A proof of concept that a knowledgeable society with access to new ICT equipments would easily deploy a self-finance own infrastructure and, thus, releasing their dependence on Telco as well as their own government in getting telecommunication services.

It results in about 4 million Indonesians on the Internet, 2000+ cyber cafés, 1500+ schools on the Internet that run on top 2500+ WiFi nodes. It increases drastically in the past years. As the Indonesian government is planning to increase phone tariff in mid 2003, starting in the first week January 2003 a free VoIP infrastructure also known as Indonesian VoIP MaverickNet was deployed on top of Indonesian Internet infrastructure. Within 3+ months, we managed to deploy 150+ VoIP gatekeepers based on www.gnugk.org freeware to handle approx. 1000 calls/gatekeeper/day for 3000+ registered user, and an estimated of 8000+ unregistered users. 

In practice, there are two (2) major technologies used as the major backbone of Indonesian bottom-up community based telecommunication infrastructure, namely, WiFi or Wireless Internet and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). WiFi based Wireless Internet run on 2.4GHz & 5.8GHz extended by external antennas is quite good for 5-8 km links bypassing Telco’s last mile. It enables NeighborhoodNet to lower access cost as an extension to TeleCenters / CyberCafes.

 As PBX in offices interconnected into the free VoIP MaverickNet via Internet Telephony Gateway, long distance & local calls is bypassed through the Internet infrastructure without any Telco interconnection. A specific VoIP MaverickNet area code, i.e., +6288, is invented. However, those who wish be called & registered to the VoIP gatekeeper using their normal Telco number, it can be easily done as the gatekeeper can recognize any form of numbers. Sadly, it means people can be called freely on Telco’s number at no charge via VoIP MaverickNet without using the expensive Telco infrastructure!

 Some tutorial files on such infrastructure can be freely downloaded from our web at http://www.apjii.or.id/~voipmerdeka/practical-guide/. A community based telecommunication infrastructure will not be possible without generous knowledge sharing done by many people on the Internet. I have to thank them.

• Onno W. Purbo onno@indo.net.id