Horas and konnichiwa untuk semua

Many in Indonesia are confused about which cellular service is 3G (UMTS, IMT-2000) and which is not. Well it is confusing and I don’t claim to be 100% sure about which are which, but let me try to clear the confusion, partly using the picture*) on the right.

GSM is a 2G technology, and Telkomsel’s Halo/Simpati, Indosat’s Matrix/Mentari are first based on this. Telkomsel once claim that its EDGE service is 3G, well it is not. EDGE is better classified as 2.5G, since it enhanced data transfer speed on GSM. 3G is CDMA based umbrella of standards, that’s why EDGE can’t be part of it. Before 3G, there was already CDMA-based networks, i.e., cdmaOne (also known as IS95a/b), and this should be categorized as 2G technology though it is supposed to be superior than GSM in terms of voice quality and low power communication. This is mostly used in Korea, USA and Japan. In Japan KDDI was the only operator that used CDMA since early stage. 3G, which is based on CDMA, is mainly comprised of two technologies now: W-CDMA and cdma2000. cdma2000 is an upgrade to cdmaOne. The first cdma2000 version is cdma2000 1xRTT, or more widely known as simply CDMA 1X. Though some considered this as 2.5G, this meets the requirement of IMT-2000, and the licensor of CDMA, Qualcomm, has always considered CDMA 1X as 3G. The update to CDMA 1X is 1xEV-DO and 1xEV-DV, and later 3xRTT, which provides faster data transmission. While W-CDMA’s upgrade to wider bandwidth for data is HSDPA.

OK, now here is the table that shows which service belongs to which technology, both in Indonesia and Japan.

*) Picture are taken from http://www.xilinx.co.jp/esp/wireless/cellular_networks/2_5g.htm

Last week I had the chance to try 3G network in Indonesia. I have Telkomsel Halo card, so I activated 3G connection by sending "3g" to 3636. Coverage is sparse. Ironically I could detect more XL’s 3G signals in Jakarta suburbs than Telkomsel’s 3G signals. Since I don’t know anyone using 3G I could only try calling 8801 to view MetroTV. The quaility is sometimes barely good enough, sometimes very bad.

UPDATE 2007/7/8: Telkomsel live TV via 3G-324M is using Dilithium’s ViVAS, as mentioned by its product PDF catalog.

I tried calling some numbers (DoCoMo, Vodafone/Softbank and NTT’s Hikaridenwa with VP-1000) in Japan, but video call was not possible, so it seems that Telkomsel does not yet switch 3G-324M traffic to operators in Japan.

I came even closer to the level of connectivity I am used to in Japan, i.e., the level of connectivity that I badly need when I am travelling abroad, especially in Indonesia. I achieved this close level via the following technologies that are available locally in Indonesia:

1. GPRS
Though an old technology, setting this to work on handsets are not always straightforward. With GPRS set and activated, I browsed Japanese websites for checking mail via browser. Both Samsung 804SS and Motorola A1000 can be used to do this, but A1000′s default browser cannot decode SJIS, the standard for Japanese web sites, so I use Opera Mini on it. I have POP client on Motorola A1000, but unfortunately it does not read JIS, in which Japanese mails are encoded.

2. MMS
The fact is even people that are usually considered technical do not use MMS. So it’s hard to find information around. For MMS I picked up Indosat’s Matrix.

3. Email<->MMS connection
Matrix has i-Memova service which is "poor’s man BlackBerry." Once i-Memova service is activated, a special mail address is activated (0816*******@mobile.indosat.net.id). Then I set my procmail to forward some important emails to this address as follows.

### Forward conditionally to Matrix as MMS
######################################################
:0 c # leave copy
* ^To:.*user1\@domain1\.com|^From:.*user2\@domain2.jp
! 0816*******@mobile.indosat.net.id

(parts in red are fake to protect privacy)

Now my phone rings whenever such email arrives. Beware of these points though :
1. Sometimes emails arrive very late.
2. Mails in Japanese sent from the handset (via MMS) are in HTML format encoded in Unicode (see "Mobile connectivity in Indonesia"), so Japanese handsets won’t display the mail properly (Japanese emails are normally encoded in JIS)