If you’re looking to regularly check your email in Bali but don’t want to have to keep using internet cafes or wifi spots, you can buy an Indonesian SIM card that will give you internet access through your phone
A while ago I wrote about Mobile Internet Access in Thailand which a lot of people found useful – so I thought I’d write up my experience of mobile internet access in Bali. I spent a month travelling in Indonesia in November 2009 and needed to keep a check on my emails. I am still using my Nokia E51 with the free Gmail application installed on it. The Gmail app is fantastic for quickly checking in and spotting anything urgent to respond to and deleting crap. Of course, you need to be using a Gmail account before you start using the Gmail app on the phone.
To get your phone connected to the internet in Bali, you need to buy an Indonesian SIM card. Telkomsel are probably the best brand to go with – I think they’re the biggest mobile provider. I bought my Telkomsel SIM card at the airport in Bali – when you walk out of the international terminal, there’s a few small kiosks selling snacks etc. One of them also advertises SIM cards and credit top-ups. I asked the guy there for a SIM card, and then also asked him if he could activate the GPRS service. This is the crucial bit to get the internet connectivity. The GPRS is activated through sending a couple of SMSs — but it’s hard to do it yourself because the instructions and texts are all written in Bahasa Indonesian. It’s probably best to ask vendors to enable GPRS rather than asking for “an internet connection” or similar as they might not get what you mean.
Once the GPRS was activated, I could get an internet connection straight away and access my emails. I was a bit surprised at how easy it was! Bali has some 3G coverage though I found it’s quite spotty – as such, sometimes it’s quite speedy and other times it just crawls along. The 3G speeds were good enough for me to connect my phone to my laptop and use the phone as a modem so I could browse the Internet on my laptop. (Info on connecting your phone to your laptop so as to access the Net using Nokia’s PC Suite is covered in my Mobile Intenet Access in Thailand post).
The cost of using the internet on my phone wasn’t too bad – doing full web browsing obviously burns up bandwidth much more than just checking emails – I noticed an hour of full web browsing could use up $3 to $5 US, while just checking email only use a few thousand rupiah each time.
Once I left Bali and sailed out to Komodo and then on to the Banda Islands, there was unsurprisingly only a few places where we could get any cellphone signal and when we did, connection speeds to check email were not fast. However, it was still good enough to simply pick up emails using the Gmail app. Full web browsing would be too painfully slow.
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