By John Tanner
Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison said on Saturday that it had managed to restore network services in the Central Java and Yogyakarta Special Region within 24 hours after a fire broke out at one of its transmitter buildings on New Year’s Day.
According to a statement published by Antara News Agency on January 6, the Indosat Gombel transmitter building in Semarang, Central Java caught fire on the morning of January 1. Separate media reports said that the fire knocked out mobile and internet services in Semarang, Yogyakarta, Kudus, Surakarta, Jakarta, Surabaya, and Malang.
By January 2, Indosat and its service partner Huawei Technologies had restored all services, Antara reported.
“Network recovery and restoring service quality are our top priorities post-incident, said Indosat president director and CEO Vikram Sinha in a statement. “Indosat, along with its partners, has proactively taken corrective measures to anticipate similar events in the future.”
He added that the operator will provide 1 GB of free data to customers affected by the outage.
Indosat has yet to provide information on the cause of the fire. A report from Indonesian website Social Expat quotes Banyumanik police commissioner Ali Santoso as saying the fire may have resulted from batteries overheating, possibly from “potential user overload on New Year’s Eve”, although this has not been comfirmed.
Indosat issued a press release on January 2 saying that data traffic increased 8.9 per cent on December 31. Indosat said at the time that it had optimised 434 priority locations and increased capacity at 527 points in anticipation of a traffic surge during the Christmas and New Year holidays.
The January 2 release made no mention of the fire at the transmitter building in Semarang or the subsequent service outage.
