Jakarta, 5 January 2024. PT XL Axiata Tbk (XL Axiata) has successfully guarded and served the surge in customer data needs during the Christmas and New Year 2024 holidays. From monitoring on 24 December 2023 to 2 January 2024, the average service traffic during the Christmas and New Year period increased by 15% compared to normal days and 19% compared to the previous Christmas and New Year period. Meanwhile, the peak increase in service traffic occurred on New Year's Eve which reached 90% compared to normal day conditions. As predicted, streaming services dominated the spike in service traffic. In contrast, legacy service traffic, namely conversations (voice) only increased by 1% and SMS by 8% compared to normal days.
Director & Chief Technology Officer of XL Axiata, I Gede Darmayusa, said, "We at XL Axiata have prepared our network in advance to serve and maintain customer convenience during the long Christmas and New Year 2024 holidays. This is XL Axiata's commitment in maintaining service quality throughout the long holiday at the end of 2023, including Christmas and New Year celebrations. And as we predicted before, there is a significant increase in data traffic given the increased mobility of people in various regions to celebrate and enjoy the Christmas and New Year holidays."
Gede continued, XL Axiata is also grateful that during the holiday period our network remained excellent, without significant disruption because XL Axiata had previously taken a number of anticipatory steps. Among these are in the form of increasing capacity up to 2 times, deploying mobile BTS (MBTS), preparing generators complete with fuel in disaster-prone areas, and readiness to carry out engineering network diversion in disrupted areas to surrounding networks.
XL Axiata data also shows the high digital activities carried out by customers during the Christmas and New Year holidays period. Data traffic in residential areas in Jabodetabek and other major cities continued to show an increase of around 15% compared to normal days. The city / regency with the highest traffic increase is Cirebon Regency, up 30%, then Surabaya City, up 22% and Bogor Regency, up 18%.
By province, the highest traffic increase occurred in Central Java Province, at 21% and North Sumatra with an increase of up to 16%, followed by West Java province at 14% and East Java province at 11%. Popular tourist destinations also experienced a significant increase in data traffic. In Malioboro area, Yogyakarta Special Region, data traffic increased by 198% compared to normal days. In Pangandaran Beach, West Java Province, data traffic increased by 143%, Sawarna Beach, Banten Province increased by 128%.
The number of XL Axiata customers who went abroad using XL Axiata programs during the Christmas and New Year holiday reached around 310 thousand customers, an increase of around 5% from the previous year. The most visited countries were Singapore, Malaysia and Cambodia.
Streaming dominates
Of the overall data service traffic during the Christmas and New Year period, it was dominated by traffic from streaming services or activities, followed by File access and Games. Streaming service traffic increased by 10% compared to normal day traffic, while gaming traffic increased by 68%.
Specifically for a number of popular social media platforms, Facebook traffic increased by 10-15% from normal days, Instagram, 23%. On video sharing services, traffic on YouTube increased by 8%, Tiktok by 4%. On messaging services, WhatsApp traffic increased by 30%.
Furthermore, for music streaming traffic, Spotify and Joox services are still the same as normal days. For games, the highest traffic was on Roblox by 106% from normal days. Then Mobile Legends, up 73%. On film streaming services, Netflix traffic was up 35% compared to normal days, WeTV 39%, Amazon Prime Video 29% and Disney+ 13%,. And as usual during the long holiday period, traffic to map services also increased. Waze GPS increased by 40%, and Google Maps increased by 23%, while Apple Map traffic was the same as a normal day.
XL Home services also experienced an increase in traffic of 12-15% when compared to normal days. This is because many people also enjoy Christmas and New Year holidays at home.
XL Axiata currently has more than 57 million customers, and is strengthened by more than 158 thousand BTS, with the majority of 4G BTS, as well as a fibre optic backbone network that stretches for more than 159 thousand km, supporting data networks spread across most of the vast Indonesian archipelago. XL Axiata also continues to invest in fibre networks, transmission, backhaul, network modernisation and various other network upgrades to improve stability, network capacity, and data service quality in line with the increasing data service traffic.