Impact of internet penetration for the economic growth of Indonesia

Abstract

Broadband internet became a daily basis for the modern life. All activities especially business is going online. Therefore, the impact of broadband Internet on the economy is interesting to be studied especially its penetration. According to Akamai, the first quarterly report of 2016, the internet speeds for IPv4 connections average peak of Indonesia of 110.2 Mbps was ranked the third before South Korea. However, the average connection speed is still far below the South Korea that has 29 Mbps, which is only 4.5 Mbps. Even though it is quite low, the year over year improvement percentage of average peak connection is consistently increased from 495% on Q4 2015 and 535% on Q1 2016. From the statistics from Akamai, even though the super-fast internet connection is available in Indonesia, it is not evenly distributed throughout the country. However, this internet penetration will keep increasing as the project of the government to connect 57 cities in Indonesia will be finished at the end of 2018.