Indosat prepares networks for Ramadhan

JAKARTA: The second-largest telecommunications operator, PT Indosat, is gearing up for a surge in voice, text and data traffic in preparation for the upcoming Ramadhan and Idul Fitri holiday season by upgrading the capacity of their networks by roughly 20 percent, executives of the company said on Thursday.

Sumantri Joko Yuwono, Indosat’s product development and management group head, added that, this year, the company planned to increase their capacity to handle short-text messages by approximately 16 percent.

“We have increased our capacity to allow us to handle 1.4 billion text messages per day from the current 1.2 billion messages per day,” he said.

He added the company could now handle 924 million minutes of voice calls per day following the upgrades.

“We have also upgraded our data capacity by 20 percent to 120 terabytes from 100 terabytes,” he said.

Ginandjar Alibasjah, the company’s group head for network operations and maintenance, noted that people would increasingly send messages through online channels, such as BlackBerry Messenger, although text messages would still remain as the primary tool through which people would communicate during the festivities.

He added that data, on the other hand, saw a 10 percent increase compared to the daily average during the celebrations in 2010, but in 2011, the increase compared to daily average was roughly 20 percent.