Numbers are always fascinating, especially to researchers, because they seem so reliable and definitive. It's time to have another look at current internet user statistics in Indonesia.

The latest APJII figures (counting up to the end of year 2007) estimate 25 Million internet users in Indonesia. That makes about 10% of the population.

Of these 25 Mil., only 2 Million (8%) are actual subscribers to an ISP. Hmm. The remaining 92% then must be made up of an estimate of multiple users (at home, office, school/university), warnet/wifi users and GPRS /3G users. (unfortunately, APJII doesn't publish the details of this estimate)

As a comparison: in Germany, where about 60% of the population are online, ONLY 5.1% of internet users DO NOT have internet service at home. (This comes from a survey of tns infratest and the D21 initiative)

The figures clearly point to the persistently high importance of the warnet/internet café for Indonesian internet culture, as well as mobile internet services. Perhaps it's this technology that is most useful for Indonesia at the moment, where the special geography makes the progress in establishing a broadband cable network that reaches the outer ends of the archipelago slow.

As Reuters reports in June this year, Indonesia is the fastest growing market for 3G technology in South East Asia. With around 16.3 Million subscribers. The operators are Telkom Flexi (PT Telkom), StarOne (Indosat), Smart Telecom, Fren (Mobile-8 Telecom), Esia (Bakrie Telecom) and Ceria (Sampoerna Telekomunikasi Indonesia or STI). Do these make up the rest of the total 25 Million?

I'm not a numbers person. Numbers confuse me. 16.3 Million seems to be a lot, and Indonesia is the fastest growing market in SEA?! What I make of it is this: Indonesians want to be online, and they want it to be affordable and flexible. They don't want to wait for the colossal Palapa Ring project to be completed to get online. Mobile services might be the way t go.

From Business Week, 2. July 2007:

A consortium of six companies (Telkom, Indosat, Excelcomindo, Bakrie Telecom, Infokom Elektrindo, Powertek Utama Internusa) are working together in the aim to build an optical fibre cable ring that is to connect 33 provinces and 440 urban centers all over Indonesia.

The ‚Cincin Pelapa’ or ‚Pelapa Ring’ Project consists of seven optical fibre networks within Sumatera, Jawa, Kalimantan, Nusa Tenggara, Sulawesi, Maluku and Papua, as well as one main line that connects the other networks. The length of the entire cable network will reach 33 000 km.

Constructions are scheduled to start in 2008, with first parts of the network ready to use in early 2009.


Sources:

• Tempointeraktif
• Kompas (print)
• Warnet2000

Internet Usage seems not to be easy to determine. Statistics vary a lot, perhaps depending on how usage is defined and the data collected. Do you count only the number of subscriptions? How about all the people sharing internet accesss in an office or in a internet café?

For example, Internet World Stats claims there were

2,000,000 Internet Users in 2000 and
20,000,000 Internet Users in 2007

in Indonesia.

That makes for a 8.9 % penetration and a use growth of 900.0 % between 2000 and 2007.


PT Insan Komunikasi, on the other hand, comes up with only

393,670 Users in 2000
and 739,571 Users in 2003 (more recent data not available)

at a growth rate of 23%

Hmmm.... neither of the sites state in detail how the data is obtained. I wonder where I can get reallly reliable stats?

Nita has conducted a small survey within the Indonesian Blog Community.

Some of the interesting results include:

- 59 % of bloggers/readers get to know about new blogs through links on blogs they already know,

- 48% read between 5-10 Blogs regularly

- 17% of readers comment 'regularly' or 'always', and 53% comment sometimes!

Read the rest of the survey here:

http://nita.goblogmedia.com/HTML/risetblog.html