Jun 1
Broadband in Bali
Bali Internet service providers (ISPs).Here’s an industry with reasonable competition but very high prices. The main problem is the lack of a fat pipe between Bali and the rest of the world. There’s no undersea fiber direct to Europe and the US. From what I understand, a lot of the internet providers go by satellite to Singapore or Hong Kong and then from there to the rest of the world. My current traceroute shows a similar path. A server in the middle of the US would go California – Hong Kong at a fast speed and then off to Jakarta, Indonesia via Satellite sloooooowwly and then from there probably by cable to Bali.
The Baseline
So, you have a lot of users competing for a relatively limited transpacific connection which makes broadband internet pretty expensive. As a comparison, my 8 Mb / second comcast connection in Boston costs about $50 a month for unlimited internet. I could theoretically download 3.5 gigabytes an hour / 84 gigs a day / 2.5 Tb a month.
But, Bali is not Boston, and we all know that. But boston is not Korea or France or Sweden where I understand fast broadband (fiber) at least in the cities is even faster and less expensive.
Click the image below to open up the comparison in a new window:
For lazy people
Indosat M2’s HSDPA based 3.6 mbps 3.5g service is looking pretty good. I scaled back the throughput to 1 mbps for the comparison because I understand from a guy that has the service that this is more realistic for international sites. Alternatively, Blueline looks like a good deal too, but the high installation cost at around USD $300 is above their competitors. The lower monthly rates should make up for it though.
If you use up between 0 and 3gb, go with Indosat M2 on their 3.5g service – it will cost max Rp 900,000. If you use 10 gb a month, it gets expensive quickly, and with Indosat M2, you will pay around Rp 4,500,000 and on Blueline between 2,000,000 and 8,000,000 depending on the time of day you use the internet. Good luck!
Update: I had the Indosat people come to the house to test the 3.5g service, but it was unstable on my hill in Jimbaran, and really designed for individual use. Probably we’ll need to look at Blueline as the alternative.
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