Govt plan may disrupt cell phone services

Mustaqim Adamrah ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 07/02/2008 10:53 AM  |  City

The Jakarta administration's plan to replace 2,500 base transceiver station (BTS) towers with 850 newer ones will lead to cellular network chaos, says a member of the Indonesian Telecommunications Regulatory Agency.

Heru Sutadi said Tuesday all cellular connections could be lost if operators are forced to move from one BTS tower to another.

"The plan to dismantle existing BTS towers and replace them with the new ones is a breach of an Information and Communications Ministry 2008 regulation on tower sharing," he said Tuesday.

The ministry issued the regulation earlier this year to back a gubernatorial decree introduced in Jakarta in 2001 on tower sharing. Each BTS tower has to be occupied by at least two cellular operators.

"The ministry regulation on tower sharing does not say to destroy existing BTS towers," Heru said.

"It requires old cellular operators to strengthen their towers to share them with new players by 2010 in anticipation of the additional load," he said.

The city spatial planning agency has so far decided on the locations for over 470 blocks of BTS towers.

Jakarta Property Management and Control Agency head Hari Sasongko said Wiriyatmoko, head of the spatial planning agency, was still preparing the BTS tower block designs and plans.

The plan to replace the towers with 850 new ones is in response to public complaints that the city looks like "tower jungle", and as a follow-up of the 2001 bylaw to require cellular operators to share BTS towers, fully implemented in a ministerial decree this year.

As a result of the 2001 ruling, the city's property management and control agency stopped issuing licenses for new towers in 2006.

The licenses for 1,508 towers expired in 2006 but were given temporary licenses again earlier this year as the agency awaits results of tower-sharing studies, which will be available at the end of the year.

The studies are being conducted by PT Jakarta Komunikasi, a subsidiary of city-owned construction firm PT Jakarta Propertindo.

The temporary licenses will expire as soon as the administration starts implementing the plan.

The property management and control agency have dismantled 75 of the 1,508 towers with expired licenses.

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