Phone access provided to 25,000 villages

The Information and Communications Ministry says it aims to provide either telephone or Internet coverage to some 25,000 villages across the archipelago by the end of 2009 as part of its 100-day program.

"The program will be called the *Ringing Village' program. Around 25,000 villages will receive telephone coverage, and around 100 of them will be given Internet coverage as well," Information and Communications Minister Tifatul Sembiring said during a hearing with the House of Representatives Commission I on Information and Communications in Jakarta on Monday.

"The villages that receive Internet services will be further developed to become *Information Villages', in which the Internet services will be complemented with the development of community radio with educational content," he added.

Tifatul also said his ministry would focus on providing telephone and Internet services to the country's most peripheral villages.

However, after the meeting, Tifatul told reporters that the main consideration for a village to be selected to receive Internet coverage relied on whether they already had the required infrastructure.

"*To recieve Internet coverage* the villages must at least have sufficient electricity and telephone network supports. For a start, we aim to provide Internet support for 100 villages, but by 2014, we hope to be able to provide access to the world wide web in 10,000 villages," he said.

Tifatul also said he was confident the ministry could provide telephone coverage to 25,000 villages by the end of this year.

"The program is a continuation of the previous term. As of now, there are some 20,000 villages that already receive telephone coverage. We still have a couple of months to go to reach for our target," he said.

One of the commission members, Effendi Choirie from the National Awakening Party (PKB), asked Tifatul how he would set his budget policy for his 100-day-program projects, including the *Ringing Village' program, considering the 100-day program was not part of the ministry's original budget set for 2009.

Tifatul said his ministry would not request additional funding from the Finance Ministry for its 100-day program. "The financing will be based on our 2009 budget," he said.

There are now some 25 million Internet users in Indonesia. Data shows that Indonesia is among the top five countries in Asia in terms of Internet usage.

However, Internet penetration in Indonesia was considerably low among its neighboring countries. For example, Internet penetration in Malaysia stands at 65.7 percent, despite the fact that users in that country number only around 16 million. Penetration in Indonesia stands at only 12.5 percent.