"We will focus on finishing the task from the government of returning the 1900 MHz frequency this year. But we will keep the 800 MHz frequency," Smartfren president director Merza Fachys told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

Smartfren has two CDMA frequencies on 800 MHz and 1900 MHz and the latter must be given back to the government at the end of 2016, he said. In exchange, the company has two frequencies on LTE at 800 MHz and 2300 MHz, he added.

Merza said Smartfren was in a transition era with customers equipped with CDMA-LTE dual mode phones. Currently, the CDMA network is still being used for voice services as in 2015 the 4G LTE service was only available for data, he said.

"We just launched the voice service with the LTE [VoLTE] feature in February 2016 so LTE now can handle voice. But for now CDMA is still needed," Merza said.

Smartfren had to make its own CDMA-4G LTE phone and currently is the only player to do so in the market due to its unique ecosystem, Merza said. (dan)

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