T

he World Bank has correlated economic growth and urbanization in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, urban areas in Southeast Asia account for 65 percent of the region'€™s US$2.4 trillion GDP.

Heralded by this robust economic growth, Southeast Asia'€™s cities expect to see 90 million more people by 2030.  Leading this is Indonesia, home to nearly 250 million people'€”over a third of the region'€™s population'€”which will soon see 55 percent of its citizens living in cities, compared to 45 percent in 2013.

With Indonesia'€™s cities already functioning as economic engines, urbanization will bring benefits, but along with it, several challenges. Jakarta'€™s population-density is at 140 people per square kilometer, placing tremendous constraints on its infrastructure.

Traffic congestion, waste management and resource consumption are among pressing issues that have potential to break any momentum generated by urbanization, if left unmanaged.

Against this agglomerated landscape, technology solutions have emerged, such as Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technology, and more broadly, the Internet of things (IOT). These enable devices embedded with electronic sensors to exchange data in a connected network, wielding potential solutions to alleviate urban stressors.

So what'€™s driving the adoption of such technologies, and how will they transform Indonesia'€™s urban landscape?

According to Redwing Asia, Indonesia'€™s telecommunications market is characterized by high mobile penetration rates'€”130 percent, with an estimated 330 million subscribers in 2015.

Technological advances have brought about a decrease in costs, allowing the less affluent to gain access to devices such as smartphones, which account for 40 percent of all mobile devices.

With mobile connectivity, the biggest enabler of IoT, now available to a large section of the population, Indonesia looks set to connect to IoT.

With the number of IoT devices in Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) estimated to balloon from 3.1 billion to 8.6 billion in the next five years, the impact of IoT in Indonesia presents tremendous opportunities to make a difference in people'€™s lives.  A number of domestic public and private sector initiatives, together with a steady stream of foreign entrants, is leading Indonesia'€™s IoT charge.

For example, Telkomsel, Indonesia'€™s largest mobile operator partnered with America'€™s Jasper, a cloud-based IoT service provider, to bring embedded services to the retail, consumer electronics, automotive telematics, utilities and healthcare sectors.

In Bandung, there'€™s the '€œSmart-City dashboard,'€ which enables people to visualize real-time traffic conditions via sensors such as speed cameras.

Jakarta has aspirations of becoming a smart city by 2018. The government has released a '€œJakarta Smart City'€ app which sees the integration of Qlue, the administration'€™s crowd-sourcing website, Waze, a traffic information and chat platform and, CROP, an app used by officials to respond to public complaints.

Plans include the further integration of transportation guides and smart health and living programs, where users can be directed to hospitals with available rooms, cutting traveling time.

Jakarta is also looking to replace conventional street lighting with more efficient technologies through the Smart Street Lighting Initiative.

And at a national level, projects have begun to explore the plausibility of IoT-integrated road use management systems to replace traffic toll booths, in a bid to ease traffic congestion and save millions of commuting minutes daily.

In terms of foreign entrants, Qatari telco Ooredoo (through Indosat) and Sweden'€™s Ericsson have launched a cloud-based M2M platform in Indonesia, in anticipation that IoT/M2M will drive growth in sectors such as banking, transportation, energy, and public services. And South Korea'€™s Samsung is looking to bring IoT services to Indonesia, including S-Health, a health and fitness data tracker.

All things considered, IoT and M2M technology, piggy-backing on urbanization, has the potential to not only transform the economy, but also to improve the population'€™s standard of living; key for Indonesia to connect to its IoT future.