Jakarta's 'tower jungle' to be felled

Mustaqim Adamrah , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Wed, 05/28/2008 12:56 PM | City

The Jakarta administration is planning to replace the city's 2500 base transreceiver station (BTS) towers with 850 newer, more strategically located towers, an official said Tuesday.

City spatial planning agency head Wiriyatmoko said the new towers would be erected at 850 different locations as recommended in a study by PT Jakarta Komunikasi.

PT Jakarta Komunikasi is a subsidiary of city-owned construction firm PT Jakarta Propertindo.

"More than 800 BTS towers will be built on vacant land throughout Jakarta. Each tower will be used by at least three cellular operators," Wiriyatmoko said at City Hall.

"The spatial planning agency will determine the towers' design. We're still working on it."

He said the plan to remove the existing towers came after complaints they made the city look like a "tower jungle".

More than 1,700 legally built BTS towers will be dismantled, Sarwo Handayani, assistant to city secretary for development, said Monday.

The plan is a follow-up of a 2006 regulation requiring cellular operators to share towers -- a system which industry experts say would drastically reduce each company's operating costs.

The concept was first introduced in Jakarta in 2001, with a gubernatorial decree stipulating each tower be used by at least two cellular operators.

As a result of the 2001 ruling, the city's property management and control agency stopped issuing licenses for new towers in 2000. The licenses for the existing 1,700 towers expired in 2006, but because the PT Jakarta Komunikasi study was only completed this year, temporary extensions were granted earlier this month.

The temporary licenses will expire as soon as the city administration starts implementing the plan to dismantle existing towers and build new ones.

Last year, the property management and control agency dismantled 75 of 1,508 towers whose licenses had expired.

Hari Sasongko, head of the agency, said the planned dismantling of towers this year could meet with budgetary hurdles.

"It costs between Rp 15 million (US$1,609) and Rp 20 million to dismantle a 20 to 30-meter-high tower," he said.

Heru Sutadi, a member of the Indonesian Telecommunications Regulatory Agency, said most cellular operators supported the shared tower concept in principle.

"But some towers cannot be used by more than two operators," he said.

"The administration should also allow operators to use one tower each for towers that serve as core nodes in their networks."

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