EV-DO comes to Bandung -- reduces digital gap

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Mon, 09/11/2006 8:25 AM  |  Life

Zatni Arbi, Contributor, Jakarta

Last month, my family and I spent the long Independence Day weekend in West Sumatra, where I was born and grew up. I was also there to attend a reunion at Prayoga School for Foreign Languages, my alma mater.

It was a merry get-together, full of excitement. As you might imagine, some of us, the alumni of the school, had not seen each other in nearly 30 years!

At the same time, we were told some distressing news. The academy, where I learned English intensively right after high school, was on its last legs. This year, only 30 high school graduates registered for enrollment. Clearly, it is far too small a number to sustain the school. What was wrong?

It was not hard to identify the root of the problems. Thirty years ago, the ability to speak English was still rare. Today, it is no longer a competitive advantage.

Back in the mid-1970s, as my classmates came to live and work in Jakarta, they were able to land good jobs at various multinational companies armed with their English-language skills.

Today, the majority of high school students from big cities in Java already have excellent English skills. If a college graduate enters the job market equipped only with the ability to read, write and speak English, no one will hire him.

""If this college wishes to survive, it will have to offer a lot of added value for its students,"" I suggested during a discussion with the college's director and teaching staff.

The students must have a much broader range of knowledge and skills in addition to English and other foreign languages. The curriculum must be reviewed and updated so the students will be better equipped to embrace changes. If possible, courses on entrepreneurship should also be included.

The trip gave me a first-hand look of the impact of the Digital Divide. I was told repeatedly that the school now had a number of PCs complete with Internet access.

They also told me they had already created a homepage for the school. To we Jakartans, this is just the same as saying their car has a steering wheel and an accelerator.

One way of helping the school regain its reputation of being able to give its students the tools to fight it out in the real world is perhaps to invite volunteer guest lecturers, scholars and even alumni to share their knowledge and vast experience.

Information technology can be a very efficient and effective means to making this a reality. With video conferencing, for example, guest lecturers will not have to waste time flying all the way to Padang.

With broadband connection, the students on the outer islands will be able to receive the same quality education as the students of more reputable universities.

This will give them the added value they need in their job. Also, with this differentiation, it should not be too difficult to attract more student enrollments, which my old school badly needs.

As I mulled over the options for achieving this, there was very encouraging news from Bandung. Bakrie Telecom (BTel) launched its not-yet commercial CDMA2000 1xEV-DO service in Bandung.

In case you have forgotten the nomenclature, EV-DO stands for Evolution-Data Optimized. It is high-speed broadband wireless access based on the CDMA technology, and it is more or less equivalent to the Third Generation (3G) Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) of the GSM. EV-DO is capable of delivering 2.4 Mbps, with an average throughput of 700 Kbps.

As an operator, Bakrie Telecom is more known for its Esia product brand. The publicly listed company has been offering CDMA-based fixed wireless services to subscribers in Jakarta, West Java and Banten.

Its aggressive promotion campaign has enabled it to rapidly increase its subscriber base to one million quite ahead of the target date it set for itself. By the end of this year, it expects to have 1.3 million subscribers.

The most important part of the launch, which took place on Aug. 25, was the inaugural lecture by Qualcomm's founder Irwin Mark Jacobs.

Qualcomm holds the patent right for CDMA, which was initially developed for U.S. military use. Using the new EV-DO infrastructure, Jacobs gave his lecture from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CALIT2) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), and it was attended by students of Bandung Institute of Technology and a group of IT journalists sitting in the institute's West Auditorium in Bandung.

Jacobs, who was responsible for commercializing CDMA technology, is also a professor and has received a number of prestigious awards as a scholar and business leader.

""Our objective is not only to showcase EV-DO's capability, but more to inspire participants of the event as well as the authority to use it to deliver courses on other subjects such as seismography, geology and medicine,"" said Aurelius Noorman Ilyas, BTel's Corporate Communications. The event in Bandung, which was also attended by Indonesian Communications Minister Sofjan Djalil, was completely initiated and sponsored by BTel.

The use of telecommunications to support distance learning, telemedicine, commerce, public services, disaster management and a lot of other activities has been discussed in so many forums by so many people.

The launch of Bakrie Telecom's CDMA2000 1xEV-DO network in Bandung, which was also part of Bakrie Telecom's corporate social responsibility program knownOut to Communities and Kids"", or ROCKS, has brought distance learning to life.

Of course, it does not really matter which technology is being used-CDMA2000 1xEV-DO or WCDMA or WiMAX-as long as it solves the ""last mile"" problem, expedites infrastructure development and allows students on the outer islands to be exposed to a broader world of knowledge.

With more choice comes affordability, and affordability is just what we need to narrow the digital gap and help prevent the younger generation in the remote provinces from getting further left behind.

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