Indonesia - Internet a Virtual Playground for Indonesian Users

The cyber world is a popular playground for many Indonesians, who mostly use it to seek information on subjects of interests, according to findings from market researcher and processing company Ipsos Indonesia released on Monday.

Iwan Murty, managing director of Ipsos Indonesia, said the Internet was used by more than six out of 10 Indonesians to seek information.

“The majority of Internet users in Indonesia said they liked to surf Web sites related to their interests,” Iwan said.

Downloading and streaming music, enjoyed by two-thirds of those polled, are the activities most frequently conducted by Internet users in Indonesia, according to Ipsos’ findings.

Meanwhile, 43 percent said they liked to download films and just under a fifth had watched live television through online streaming during the past three months, Iwan said.

Ipsos, which is headquartered in Paris, conducts monthly surveys on Internet users in 24 countries through the Online Ipsos Panel. The countries surveyed were mostly G20 members from around the world.

The country with the highest percentage of internet users seeking information was Turkey, followed closely by China and Hungary. In China, 72 percent of the Internet users download music online, 71 percent download films and 55 percent like to watch television programs over the Internet.

“We found that three out of every 10 Indonesians questioned, or 27 percent, like to play online video games, while China tops the list with 61 percent of Internet users playing online video games, followed by Poland with 47 percent and Turkey with 38 percent,” Iwan said.

With a population of 240 million, a fast-growing middle class as well as growing access to the Internet through mobile smartphones, it is estimated that 45 million of Indonesia’s population are Internet users.

The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has said that by the end of this year, every subdistrict in Indonesia would be connected to the Internet.

“We have to have 100 percent [connectivity] this year,” Ashwin Sasongko, the ministry’s director general of IT applications, told The Jakarta Globe earlier this month.

Last year, the ministry introduced Mobile Internet Service Centers (MPILK), which are essentially small buses equipped with six laptop computers with a satellite Internet connection. Each unit also features a 124-centimeter flat-screen television and a telephone line.

Ashwin said that there had so far been 5,748 MPILKs, each dedicated to a single subdistrict. Each unit costs around Rp 500 million ($55,000), with their operating funds are collected from cellular and Internet providers in Indonesia.

“Each [provider] contributes about 1.5 percent of its profit [for the program],” Ashwin said.

Indonesia ranks the second-highest countryin the world in the number of Facebook users, while it comes in third place for Twitter users.

Ismira Lutfia

The Jakarta Globe

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