Horas and konnichiwa untuk semua

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)

This is taken when logging in into Connexion from a Korean Air flight this week. Yes, its going away for good, so take the chance to use it by flying on flights with Connexion. It will be free till the end of this year.

The following shows the speed of Connexion, not bad, though the speed is not very stable.