In today’s world, having a reliable internet connection is crucial for personal and professional endeavors. With the increase in remote work, online learning, and social media use, the need for fast and stable internet has become more critical than ever. However, not all areas are fortunate enough to have access to reliable internet services just like my district. Some may have to wait years and years for their preferred internet service provider (ISP) to become available to their district, while others may have to settle for alternatives.
In this article, I will discuss my personal experience choosing an ISP in my district.
A glimpse of Indihome
Indihome (formerly Telkom Speedy) is an internet service provider that has the largest coverage and is owned by the government in Indonesia. I still remember when Telkom still used the name “Telkom Speedy” for their internet cable plan before changing to “Indihome” back then in late 2014. I honestly never had a bad experience when using their products because mostly I used their internet at schools, campus, and public spaces, but back then there were a lot of people that gave bad reviews for their products.
In the long run, some private ISP took advantage of this problem and capture Telkom Speedy market share by offering home internet service plans. Not so long after that, Telkom Speedy change its name to Indihome due to their new technology fiber optics as their main service to excel their internet connections. But I still believe that it’s just their strategy to get rid of their bad track record.
But, that didn’t last long though…
After a few years passed, A few weeks ago to be precise, a Twitter user @rendy share an image that explain why Indihome has poor internet performance, and it happened due to their over capacity on NCIX Exchange.
You can see the bandwidth almost reaches the maximum capacity, that’s why most of their users encounter poor connections such as low speed and rto.
And that’s all about the history of Indihome.
Pay the excess or join the waiting list
We know that Indihome has the largest coverage area among other internet service providers in Indonesia. But I still can’t figure out why they’re still not available in my district until now, honestly almost available. Look at this image below;
There is an ODP pole in my neighborhood, about 300 meters away from my house. But when I reach out to Indihome’s technician, they told me that the range between the pole and my house is exceed the limits of the cable which is only 250m, so in short, I have to pay the excess of the cable limit, or I have to sign up for the waiting list until there are some people nearby that want to use their home internet services too.
Because the price of the excess cable is not cheap for my pocket, I discourage myself not to install Indihome on my house and wisely use broadband internet services.
Giving up using Broadband Internet Plans
I’ve been living with broadband internet for my entire life and I have to continue using it because my district is still not covered by internet cable. There is a lot of broadband provider such as Telkomsel, IM3, AXIS, XL, Smartfren, you name it. But unluckily in my district, there were just three providers that have excellent signals which are Telkomsel, LiveOn, and Byu.
I am using a 4G modem to connect my devices to the internet and currently using Byu as a broadband internet provider. The experiences I have was good because the internet speed is above 40 Mbps and has cheaper internet plans.
But the problem is, It is limited by Bandwith to around 100GB for IDR 180K per month. For me, it was enough, until I found out that there was an anomaly with the use of the Bandwith.
When I thought that I only use little bandwidth per day, but instead the Bandwith often reaches almost 80% in a short time. Even sometimes, it reaches 100% even when I’m not using the devices to browse the internet.
This anomaly started to happen a lot when I bought Huawei E5576 4G modem, before that I was using a hotspot from my other smartphone. The reason why I am sure that this anomaly was caused by the 4G modem is that I’ve checked my daily internet consumption on my Mac and Device and it only consumes about 1GB daily, but the bandwidth used was around 6GB only for 5 hours.
I have a feeling that my modem is infected by malware and acts as a botnet, sigh.
I thought It was Indihome’s ODP Pole
A few weeks ago, someone has planted an ODP pole right in front of my house’s street, and I mistakenly assume that the ODP belongs to Indihome which is not. After calling Indihome’s technician to my house, they told me that the ODP does not belong to them, instead, it belongs to Fiberstar.
At first I still not believing what he said but then he told me to call his friend who is a sales representative of the ISP that collaborates with Fiberstar infrastructure which is CBN Fiber. But after I did some research about ISP and how the internet spread across my country, now I know that there are a lot of types of ODP poles. And ODP not only belongs to an ISP but also to internet infrastructure just like Fiberstar in Indonesia.
Some ODP also represents their ISP uniqueness; e.g;
- Indihome has two colors red and white on the middle of the pole
- Fiberstar has pink color on top of the pole
- XL Home may not have any color on the pole, but It has its sticker “XL Home” on the box
- MNC has two strips at the bottom of the pole
I don’t know if there is any internet infrastructure besides Fiberstar, but I know some ISP that collaborate with Fiberstar such as MyRepublic, XL Home, and CBN Fiber. Even though they have their own ODP, I’m sure that some ISP can’t see any benefits if they planted a lot of ODP in outlying areas without considering how many customers will sign up for their internet plans.
Choosing between XL Homes or CBN Fiber
So after a couple of days of doing research on which ISP collaborates with Fiberstar, the two ISP available in my district are XL home and CBN fiber, from the two ISP I conclude that XL home has better offerings and services, with IDR 280K monthly I can get unlimited internet with a speed of 30 Mbps (tax included), moreover they have discounts price for a new member for 6 months so it will be 240K/month for 6 months.
But sadly, after having a discussion with the sales representative, because the Fiberstar network is still new in my district, it will take 2 months for XL homes to become available for installation.
So as you can guess, my last option is only CBN fiber which has IDR 330K/month with a speed of 20 Mbps (up to 40 Mbps only for 3 months). For me who has a tight budget for internet purposes, the price really matters for me because I still have to pay my mobile internet plans monthly. And the speed also matters because I will use it with my parents and sister.
Afterward, I call the technicians to come and install CBN Fiber in my house. And it didn’t take a long time to finish, maybe it was around 1 hour until we can use the Internet with ease.
This is the speed test of my CBN network after installations
I’m using CloudWarp+ VPN when I did the test above, but even when I’m not using the VPN the speed test result is still the same.
Final Review
After two days straight of using CBN Fiber, I’ve come to the conclusion that their connection is pretty stable with an average download speed of 40 Mbps using torrents. But I found it lagging when doing facetime, or video calls. The best thing is that the upload speed is pretty symmetrical with the download speed, for me as a content creator it helps me a lot when I tried to upload my video.
But, I am still curious about XL Home because they have a better offer than CBN Fiber, maybe I should visit my friend’s house sometime because he uses XL Home in his house.
Maybe in the next three months, I will come back and rewrite my final reviews about CBN Fiber.