Indonesia’s operators and ISP make progress with LTE

As of June 2011, the number of mobile phone subscriptions in Indonesia was recorded to be 220 million which corresponds to a penetration rate of 92% over an estimated population of around 237.6 million.

At the end of 2012, The three main operators owned 221 million of the then 278 million mobile subscribers in Indonesia.

• Telkomsel is undeniably the largest operator, and its user base of 123 million makes it the 7th largest mobile company in the world. 
• Indosat with 55 million subscribers 
• XL Axiata with 42 million subscribers
• 3 (known as Tri in Indonesia), which has 20 million subscribers.

As of December 2014, all three of the biggest telcos, along with ISP Bolt! launched their 4G LTE networks commercially in the country. In order to be able to use the 4G connections in Indonesia, you must use 4G-ready smartphones. To connect to 4G network from operators, users in Indonesia must first exchange the SIM cards in respective service centers, and then subscribe to specific data plans. For Bolt, you can either connect to its 4G modem via a 4G smartphone, or directly use Bolt SIM cards which are only compatible with Bolt’s own smartphones.

Bolt! at the beginning of 2015 it claimed to be the first operator of 4G LTE  to have more than one million customers in Indonesia .

Based on the presentation (embedded below) they are using two carriers and they move users between the frequencies using inter-frequency handover to which ever one is less congested. This process is done automatically as a part of Mobility Load Balancing (MLB) which is a feature of Self-Optimising Network (SON).