Review: Best Internet Providers in Bali

Guide to Bali’s Most Popular Internet Providers for Residence.

This week’s blog is written for our Bali audience, especially for expats and digital nomads.

According to Forbe’s article See The Top 25 Global Destinations For Digital Nomads, Bali is on the top of that list. Internet is not a luxury anymore. It’s a utility as crucial as electricity and water. 

Bali has many Internet Service Providers, but a few more common ones are IndiHome, GlobalXtreme, Biznet, and CBN.

First, let’s get the technical terms out of the way. Speed is measured in Mbps or megabits per second. Mbps is different from MBps, which is short for megabytes per second. MBps is the actual transfer speed when you download a file. The important thing to note is a 50Mbps package yields 6.25MB/sec transfer speed (1/8th of Mbps). 

Then, there’s the term “up to”. Internet packages are sold in “up to” for residence/home Internet and it means that more often than not, it doesn’t get up to that speed.

On with the ISP.  Based on our experience, these are the conclusions: 

• IndiHome provides the most coverage in Indonesia. It’s expensive and it blocks Netflix, which is the biggest challenge for most expats. Most of the time they deliver 75% of the “up to” speed, and is quite stable.

• GlobalXtreme is about as expensive as IndiHome except it doesn’t block Netflix. Speed wise, they are slow and generally reaches half of the “up to” speed.

• Biznet doesn’t block Netflix and delivers 75% of the “up to” speed most of the time.

• CBN doesn’t block Netflix and delivers 75% of the “up to” speed most of the time.

Note: The maximum bandwidth deliverable depends on the distance from your location to the ISP’s central hub. The shorter the distance, the higher the deliverable speed.  To find out if they are available in your area, contact them directly.