Despite the rising number of internet users, a digital gulf is dividing the archipelago with wildly unequal access, speed and proficiency between more developed western and poor eastern regions. The Jakarta Post’s Dylan Amirio, Pandaya, Nethy Dharma Somba and Bambang Muryanto take a close look at the issue.

A heartwarming picture of a taxi driver and an app motorcycle taxi driver sitting side by side on a quiet roadside intently looking at the screen of a smartphone went viral on social media after their protesting colleagues engaged in brawls that turned Jakarta’s streets into a battlefield in March.

Thousands of conventional taxi drivers took to the streets demanding the government ban the operation of internet-based ride-hailing app services such as Grab, GoJek and Uber, which have established a considerable presence as more reliable, cheaper alternatives.

Conventional taxi drivers have complained about a steep drop in their incomes following the arrival of their technology-savvy competitors, which they accuse of operating illegally but enjoying government privileges despite not paying taxes.

 Giving off a vibe of peace, the photograph tells a lot of things that the drivers may not be aware of: discrepancies in the technological proficiency among them as the internet revolutionizes life in this digital era, including the way people earn money.

The unstoppable advancement of digital technology has caught people with a “conventional” mindset like the taxi drivers and state policymakers alike by storm. After the protest, Bluebird — Jakarta’s largest taxi company — vowed to upgrade its online service, which used to be confined to BlackBerry users, as a strategy to compete with its internet-based competitors. The government immediately promised to revise Law No. 22/2009 on traffic and road transportation to accommodate the presence of app-based transportation modes.

The presence of Uber, Grab and GoJek has long shown up a “policy divide” between President Joko Widodo, who wants to accommodate the app-based taxis and Transportation Minister Ignasius Jonan who insists on banning them.

A survey conducted by the Association of Indonesian Internet Providers (APJII) in cooperation with the University of Indonesia (UI) between November 2014 and February 2015 provides a fresh look at the state of the digital divide in the country.

It found that close to 89 million — 35 percent of Indonesia’s 250 million population — already had access to the internet in 2014, up from the 28.6 percent in 2013 and 24.2 in 2012.

 And the number is expected to continue to rise along with the burgeoning middle class and the fact that more business, politics, governance, education and entertainment have been moving online since Indonesia started building the infrastructure in the 1980s.

Although the number of internet users is increasing, the access divide remains wide open due mainly to financing and infrastructure constraints, as the survey found. Indonesia remains way behind ASEAN neighbors, such as Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, in terms of internet penetration despite its status as one of the world’s largest users of Facebook and Twitter.

 The study revealed that most internet users live in western Indonesia: Java, Bali and Sumatra, where they account for 52 million people. Sulawesi comes a distant second with 7.3 million users and the eastern regions of Maluku, Nusa Tenggara and Papua with 5.9 million. Kalimantan slumps at the bottom of the list with 4.2 million.

The demographic gap still masks serious discrepancies in infrastructure development: The internet is enjoyed by people in major cities such as Bandung, West Java; Denpasar, Bali; Jakarta; Medan, North Sumatra; Surabaya, East Java; and Yogyakarta. Although the country’s vast rural areas are also vital when it comes to development, they are yet to obtain equal access.

This inequality widens the development gap among provinces in Indonesia. In the education sector, for instance, outlying regions of Papua, where internet connections come and go, are farther trailing behind Java where the internet has become a basic facility.

The basic problem with the Indonesian internet network is access and speed. It was only in November 2015 that the entire country was properly “reframed” to enable a nationwide mobile 4G/LTE network to operate.

No doubt, access and speed have significantly improved over time but even with the advent of higher speed broadband networks and the adoption of 3G and 4G mobile networks nationwide, the truth remains that access is not uniform throughout the archipelago and the quality is still patchy at best.

According to Akamai, a global content delivery network services provider, the average speed of internet connection in Indonesia was 2.2 Mbps last year, way slower than that of neighboring Singapore (12.9 Mbps), Malaysia (4.3 Mbps), the Philippines (2.8 Mbps) and Vietnam (3.2 Mbps).

“Nationally, western regions, which have major cities, are better connected than those in the east. There is an access divide between cities and small towns,” says Heru Sutadi, founder of the Indonesian Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Institute.

Even though high-speed networks, such as 4G, are available in some rural areas, they are operated by multiple providers who set different rates – all still too expensive for the masses and at the end of the day only the richer and more educated can afford them.

 Smartphones, the service backbone of many businesses like GoJek, Grab and Uber as well as home industries, are the most common mode used to access the internet. According to tech behemoth Google, 43 percent of Indonesians use such devices for daily communication and internet access and the UI-APJII survey found that 85 percent of users access the internet via their cell phones.

Hugely popular thanks to their more affordable prices, smartphones are no longer a luxury. For lower-end consumers, local and global-brand phones are available for less than Rp 1 million (US$76) and the used cell phone business keeps on booming.

But only a small proportion of smartphone owners in the country are proficient enough to use their sophisticated device for really productive purposes like browsing for information and business. As the UI-APJII survey revealed, 87.4 percent of users take to the internet mostly for social media.

 With a budding digital economy beginning to take on a healthy shape in the country, various surveys show that the internet is also increasingly used for more commercially productive purposes.

 “What’s interesting is that many rural users have already used the internet over the last two years to compare prices of rice or fish [with those in other places] so that they are not ripped off by market prices,” Heru says.

For its part, the Communications and Information Technology Ministry has laid down a vision of narrowing the digital divide in its 2015-2019 strategic masterplan, which aims to maximize the use of the internet to boost the economy and improve governance.

The plan outlines the need to improve public access to ICT and increase the range and size of telecommunications infrastructure within the next five years.

High on the government agenda is implementation of ambitious projects, such as the Palapa Ring project, and the requirement for telecommunications providers to share their infrastructure. The plan puts an emphasis on the digital economy and e-commerce becoming leading actors in economic growth.

Aside from the basic issues related to equality of access and speed, the state is yet to make the best use of ICT for poverty eradication and the empowerment of people in less developed regions through education.

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