REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA - Indonesia has potential to be an international Internet hub, given the increasing use of Internet in the country, said Bandung Institute of Technology IT expert Suhono Harso Supangkat on Thursday.
"Currently, the global Internet traffic hub for Asian region is located in Singapore, Hong Kong, or Japan. Indonesia also has the capability and is viable to be a hub because of the large market potential and the growth in Internet traffic in the last five years," Supangkat said.
Internet users in Indonesia had grown 13 percent in 2013 compared to 2012, or increased from 63 million to 71.19 million, Supangkat said. Indonesia already has a pretty strong submarine undersea backbone cable and fiber optic infrastructure, and the Sulawesi-Maluku-Papua Cable System project owned by the state's telecommunication operator, Telkom, has been completed.
The red-plated telecommunication's interprovincial cable project has been providing 5,444 kilometers of submarine cable and 655 kilometers of terrestrial cable, which uses Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing network to deliver 32x100 gigabytes bandwidth capacity per fiber pair. The project is expected to be fully operational by 2015. Telkom has invested 1.7 trillion IDR for the project.