General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) has made significant impact on telecommunication industry in Indonesia. It ended the monopoly of telecommunication services provided for decades by two of State Owned Enterprises (SOE), PT Telkom and PT Indosat. After the GATS agreement, anyone can be a telecommunication services provider in Indonesia. Furthermore, the GATS agreement also describe that the protection toward domestic provider must be ended and gradual liberation must be accomplish in certain reasonable period reflected to the schedule of commitments in WTO. Due to this condition, Indosat must anticipate by re-planning, repositioning and reform its core business and organization in order to survive and gain some advantage from this new telecommunication platform policy that strongly support free competition. And so, the purposes of this paper are to examine and describe the anticipation of Indosat toward the new telecommunication platform and the Indosat participation toward the obligation to provide universal services.
By using the description method with qualitative approach and back up fundamentally by service trade theories and GATS General principles along with obligation in telecommunication industry sets by WTO, this research is to find out how far that Indosat used its potentiality such as human resources, infrastructures, financial power, and its clusters to deaf with the trade liberation drive by GATS and to gain some advantage from the four Mode of Supply.
The anticipation of Indosat toward the impact of GATS is done by focusing in wireless telecommunication business and by convergent the telecommunication sector with multimedia sector particularly in the advanced of Internet technology. Furthermore, Indosat is also gain some fundamental benefit from Mode of Supply and from lndosat cooperation along with other subsidiary of STT Telemedia Group. While in the obligation to provide universal services, Indosat have a quite limited participation by providing telecommunication infrastructures in several Java regions and rely heavily on government initiative. Indosat also less satisfactory to community due to the case that it only heavily provide personal services through its wireless technology rather than providing services for community or group. The Indosat's wireless technology on communal based is not affordable because it's costly. Actually Indosat can and should participated more than what it has been done by developed a co-partnership with people to provide a win-win solution in expanding the universal service obligation and by built affordable services for community (communal based).
A thorough and integrated understanding of telecommunication industry and services in Indonesia is very important due to benefit that society will gain from it. The telecommunication industry will open many new opportunities and create information society, which is a pra-requirement for advanced, and knowledge based society.