With over 250 million people, Indonesia has the world’s fourth-largest population and the largest in Southeast Asia. While the government’s vision for information and communications technology (ICT) is “to bring into reality a modern information society, prosperous and highly competitive, with strong support from ICT”, the current development is still a long way off this goal.
The country does not yet have a complete database with the total number of local governments that have implemented online services.
An NGO has filed criminal charges against State-Owned Enterprises Minister Rini Soemarno for authorizing Indonesian communications provider Telkom to build a data center in Singapore, partly owned by a Singapore parastatal, that would host Indonesian government data.
In its report to the National Police in Jakarta late on Wednesday, the watchdog group Indonesia Club said it had no issues with the data center serving corporate clients, but that its proposed hosting of Indonesia’s e-government services violated state intelligence and electronic communications laws.
Indonesia state-owned operator Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom) plans to expand its focus on government customers this year, The Jakarta Post reports, citing Telkom’s director for enterprises and business service Muhammad Awaluddin. “Telkom will expand its focus on its enterprise and business services not only on large companies and small to medium enterprises, but also on government agencies as the current administration has a very strong focus on information, communications and technology”, Awaluddin said. Telkom will mainly focus on the development of e-governance, e-health, e-education, e-logistics and e-procurement, he added.
Read more: Indonesia's Telkom shifts focus on government customers
Indonesia plans to invest Rp 278 trillion ($21 billion) in improving broadband connectivity across the country, an official at the Ministry of Information and Communication said on Thursday.
Muhammad Budi Setiawan, director general of information and communication technology resources and standards at the ministry, said the so-called “Indonesia Broadband Plan” targets 71 percent of Indonesia’s urban area to have internet capabilities of 20 megabytes per second (Mbps) and 30 percent of urban populations to have access to it by 2019.
Villages, Disadvantaged Regions and Transmigration Minister Marwan Jafar said that the ministry was aiming to provide Internet access to 5,000 villages in the country this year.
“I am developing online villages and there will be 5,000 of them this year,” Marwan said as quoted by Antara news agency.
Marwan said he was optimistic that the target could be met in spite of funding problems.
Read more: ID: National scene: Poor villages to get Internet access