Broken undersea cables disrupt PT Telkom’s services in Jayapura

Broken undersea cables

Jayapura, Papua (ANTARA) – The services offered by state-owned telecommunication enterprise PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia (Telkom) to its customers in Jayapura City and the districts of Jayapura and Sarmi, Papua Province, got disrupted since Friday after its undersea cables broke.

“We apologize for the inconvenience caused to our customers,” Head of the PT Telkom-Papua Office Sugeng Widodo told ANTARA in Jayapura, the capital of Papua Province, on Saturday.

This state-owned telecommunication giant’s undersea fiber optic cables, located between Sarmi and Biak, reportedly broke since Friday evening.

Consequently, PT Telkom’s services for Jayapura and the districts of Jayapura and Sarmi got disrupted, though customers in other areas were not affected, Widodo remarked, adding that the company would require a month’s time to solve the problem.

To handle this technical problem, the company’s affected customers were partly served through satellite-based services, though they were not optimally served.

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Broken undersea cables news source: ANTARA NEWS

NOTES:

A former Dutch colony, West Papua was formally incorporated into Indonesia in 1969, after an undisputed vote of about 1,025 representative tribal leaders. The result of the plebiscite was overseen and endorsed by the United Nations.

Since the democratization in 1998, especially since 2007, democracy by mean of elections has been introduced to increase political participation in the two provinces. The fact that the leaders of Papua and West Papua provinces are democratically elected by the people has strengthened the legality of the region as a province of Indonesia.

During the Abdurrahman Wahid administration in 2000, aside from changing the province name from “Irian Jaya” to “Papua”, Papua gained a “Special Autonomy” status, a political compromise between Papuans and the central government.

The political will of politicians in Jakarta to proceed with the implementation of the Special Autonomy was formalized in 2001 with the special autonomy law.

Special autonomy is part of democratic means to address aspiration of Papuan people. In late 2001, Indonesian government introduced a “special autonomy” bill for West Papua. The bill, which was drafted mostly by indigenous Papuans, passed the Indonesian parliament as Law No. 21 in November 2001.