BOLT! Super 4G

» see bolt.id as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I have paid an internet bill every month since about 1998 and I have never once wondered whether the company sending it was paying its own. That is what this grave is about. BOLT! did not lose to a faster competitor or run out of customers. It stopped because the company behind it owed the Indonesian state 343 billion rupiah in frequency fees and the state took the frequency back.

PT Internux launched BOLT! on 14 November 2013 as the first commercial 4G LTE service in Indonesia, running TD-LTE on the 2.3 GHz band. You bought a modem or a pocket router, put a BOLT card in it, and got speeds nobody else in the country was selling to consumers. Internux was a Lippo Group company sitting under PT First Media, which is the piece of the structure that eventually mattered more than any of the engineering.

It grew the way a first mover grows in a country where fixed lines never reached most people. Five thousand subscribers inside three months and a million by February 2015, reaching somewhere around four million by August 2018. The permanent catch was the map. The license covered Jakarta with its surroundings plus Medan, so a national brand was really a two-city product, and every operator with nationwide spectrum was building LTE on top of coverage BOLT! could not buy.

There is a version of this story where it simply gets outrun over the following few years, and that version was probably coming. It never got the chance to happen.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the bill ~

Spectrum in Indonesia is licensed and the license carries an annual charge, the biaya hak penggunaan. Internux stopped paying it. Across 2016 and 2017 the company ran up about 343.57 billion rupiah in arrears on the 2.3 GHz band. First Media, its sister company under the same group, owed a further 364.84 billion on the same band, putting the pair a little over 708 billion rupiah into the ministry.

Notice went out in November 2018 and the revocation was announced on the nineteenth. The ministerial decrees are dated 28 December 2018, and that is the day the network stopped answering in Jakarta and Medan. A regulator turning off four million paying customers is a heavy thing to do, and it did it over an invoice, which tells you how long the invoice had been sitting there.

~ four million people on a Friday ~

28 December 2018 was a Friday. Most subscribers learned about it when the modem stopped working, and Twitter carried the results. The ministry instructed Internux to return unused balances and quota, refunds ran into January 2019, and customers were pointed at Smartfren or at First Media's fixed line. Sixteen BOLT! modem models were later cleared to be unlocked officially for other 4G operators, which is a small mercy and a rarer one than it should be.

~ what is at the address now ~

Internux was left insolvent without being wound up, kept on the books as a subsidiary of a company with problems of its own. The bolt.id domain still resolves. What it serves is search-optimized filler about unlocking old BOLT modems and downloading Android apps, produced by whoever holds the name now.

The network is gone and the hardware is still in drawers all over Jakarta. Somebody is making a living, six years later, off people trying to get a dead operator's modem onto a live operator's network. That is what a consumer telecom leaves behind when it goes suddenly: not nostalgia, just a long tail of orphaned equipment and the people monetizing it.

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