Smartphone adoption in rural Indonesia as high as 16 percent, study finds

Well what do you know!

Kurtis Heimerl – who installed an OpenBTS community owned cellular network in a remote village in Papua in 2012 – continues to study how that network is being used.

In his most recent publication, based on data collected in from August to December 2014, he finds that smartphone penetration in that village is at 16 percent, similar to the Indonesian average which varies between 14-24 percent for 2014 (depending on the study).  Another interesting fact about this figure: Heimerls data is hard data the team collects directly from the devices detected by the network, whereas most other studies are based on surveys and estimates.

Why do I think this is interesting?

• if the average smartphone penetration in Indo is somewhere between 14-24 percent, but at 16 percent even in the tiniest village, it either means the average is wrong, or smartphone penetration is pretty evenly distributed, not much denser in urban than rural.

• Heimerl also found people were owning smartphone devices even prior to the install of the community owned network, when the signal in their village was very spotty.

• I think this shows there’s huge potential for creators of content and services to really have the rural population in mind.

• shows potential for open BTS based cellular networks like Heimerl’s.