Jakarta’s WiFi Village

We have a short meetup with Filipina blogger Armina at the Plaza Senayan the other day along with her husband Yuda and 2 kids.

Her husband mentioned that they were employing a wifi village arrangement in their area. Since broadband is still expensive here in Indonesia, what he did was signed up for a SoHo (Small Office, Home Office) package from the ISP. It cost him about 2 Million Rupiahs (roughly Php11,000USD 187INR 15,891EUR 179CNY 1,365) a month and the connection speed were just in the hundreds of Kbps.

However, since the SoHo package allows the subscriber of up to 40 workstations connected to it, he sublet his connection via Wifi. before upgrading to the business package, he surveyed and asked around if enough people are interested in their area. Once he has the numbers, he’ll hook up an access point and buy the new customer a wifi antenna receiver hooked up on a bamboo pole outside the house.

For every additional customer he gets, he’ll add more wifi access points and hook them up into the network. Yuda charges about Rp100,000 (Php500USD 9INR 722EUR 8CNY 62+) for the connection cost and it’s unlimited. Some residential cable internet rates can go up to USD$60 for 64/64Kbps upstream and downstream — and that doesn’t include cable TV charges. So, this wifi village idea is cheap!

Very nice business model in a huge city where broadband is scarce and expensive. Reminds me of WiFi ng Bayan. Are they still operating?