On Friday at around 8:45AM Western Indonesian Time (WIB), telecommunications company PT Pasifik Satelit Nusantara (PSN) launched the Nusantara Satu Satellite, Indonesia's first internet-only satellite.
In front of one giant LED screen, more than 300 people crowded the lobby of the telecommunications company to watch the live broadcast of a SpaceX Falcon 9 space rocket located over 17,400 kilometers away at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the United States.
"Right at 8.45 a.m. WIB yesterday, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral Florida, United States, bringing Indonesia’s Nusantara One Satellite to Earth orbit. The internet service from this Satellite will reach the entire Indonesian archipelago," tweeted President Jokowi.
Adi Rahman Adiwoso, the Managing Director of PSN, said that the satellite is meant to provide fast internet communication network in the country.
"The need for internet or broadband is very high; we estimate that there are 25,000 villages that do not have adequate internet communication connections. So, our target is to help them," explained Adi, moments before the launch.
Nusantara Satu, or also called the PSN VI, is Indonesia's sixth and its highest capacity satellite to date.
Promising to help bridge Indonesia’s digital gap and thus boost economic activity in the regions outside of Java, Nusantara Satu is Indonesia's first satellite to use the High-Throughput Satellite (HTS) with capacity up to 15Gbps.
This technology can provide broadband internet services with significantly greater capacity than other conventional satellites owned by Indonesia.
The satellite has a capacity of 26 C-band transponders and 12 Extended C-band transponders. In addition, there are also 8 Ku-band spot beams, which can cover all regions in the country.
Among the viewers, was PSN finance director Ravi Talwar.
“I was anxious. It had to work. We had hundreds of people working on this for four years," he said.
His anxiety was justified as the Nusantara Satu project cost $230 million, and it was financed by the PSN’s internal funds at 30 percent, and state-owned export credit agency Export Development Canada at 70 percent.
As for the cost of the launch, SpaceX's has a form of "ride-sharing" where the Nusantara Satu satellite shared the Falcon 9's cargo hold with two other payloads: a U.S. Air Force experimental spacecraft, and an Israeli moon lander.
This ride-sharing halved the cost of launching Nusantara Satu, which used four tons out of the Falcon 9’s maximum seven-ton capacity.
Once reaching its geostationary orbit above Papua, the Nusantara Satu, which has a capacity of 15,000 megabits per second (Mbps), is expected to provide internet connectivity of up to 3Mbps for 10,000 Indonesian villages this year.
Here, the PSN directly sells its satellite internet to those remote villages, which otherwise, could not access conventional internet facilities.
The company is so optimistic over its market potential that it has already begun working on two more satellites named the Nusantara Dua and Nusantara Tiga, which are slated for launch in 2020 and 2022 respectively.
And the Nusantara Satu satellite here is rented by the Telecommunications and Information Accessibility Agency (BAKTI) of the Ministry of Communication and Informatics, in line with BAKTI’s goal to provide internet facilities in the areas not yet covered by fiber optic cables.
BAKTI wants to use the Nusantara Satu Satellite service for the next five years, while waiting for the completion of the Government multi-functional satellite expected to be completed in 2023.
The ministry is also working on its own Satria 1 satellite.
Slated for launch in 2022, the Satria 1 satellite is designed to have a larger capacity of 150 gigabits per second than the Nusantara Satu, but its connectivity is meant to focus on only public facilities, such as schools, clinics and regional administrative offices.
