PT Telkom to Deploy 100,000 Wi-Fi Access Points in Indonesia

Time has a way of settling old debates. 

So it is that PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia Tbk (PT Telkom), Indonesia's largest communications service provider, is deploying 100,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across Indonesia, to help PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia cope with rapidly-growing mobile data demand.

No more do service providers "worry" about whether Wi-Fi competes with, or complements, mobile data access.

Cisco says the new network of access points will create the largest Wi-Fi network operated by a single service provider in Asia.

PT Telkom expects mobile data traffic to double each year through at least 2016. The Cisco Visual Networking Index also predicts that mobile data traffic in Indonesia is expected to grow 32 times from 2011 to 2016, with an average per user consumption at 716 megabytes of mobile data traffic per month in 2016, a staggering 2,387 per cent increase from 30 megabytes per month in 2011.

Indonesian mobile data traffic will grow four times faster than Indonesian fixed IP traffic from 2011 to 2016.

And though Indonesia's mobile data traffic was two percent of total IP traffic in 2011, mobile data will represent 17 percent of total Indonesian IP traffic in 2016.