Indonesia: 143 Landing Points and the World's Most Complex Cable Network

Based on GeoCables monitoring data, TeleGeography records, and Indonesian government infrastructure reports. April 2026.

Indonesia has 143 submarine cable landing points — more than Japan (68), Brazil (74), and Singapore (8) combined. Only the United States (162) and the United Kingdom (126) have more. But while those countries are compact landmasses connected by long-haul international cables, Indonesia's cable network exists for a fundamentally different reason: connecting Indonesia to itself.

The world's largest archipelago stretches 5,120 km across the equator — roughly the distance from Lisbon to Moscow. Its 17,000 islands are home to 280 million people, and there is no way to connect them except by submarine cable. No terrestrial fiber can cross the Banda Sea. No microwave tower reaches from Java to Papua. The sea is the only path, and Indonesia has built one of the most complex submarine cable networks on Earth to bridge it.

72 Cables: The Full Count

GeoCables tracks 72 submarine cables that touch Indonesian soil or waters. Of these:

• 42 are purely domestic — connecting Indonesian islands to each other, with no landing outside the country
• 30 are international — linking Indonesia to Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, the United States, and beyond

No other country in the world has this ratio. Most nations have a handful of domestic cables at most. Indonesia has forty-two — because geography demands it.

The Palapa Ring: A Government Megaproject

The centrepiece of Indonesia's domestic cable infrastructure is the Palapa Ring, a government-funded project to connect all 514 regencies and cities across the archipelago with broadband. Named after the Palapa satellite that first unified Indonesian telecommunications in 1976, the Palapa Ring consists of three segments:

The East segment alone — 6,300 km — is longer than the transatlantic cables connecting Europe to North America. It loops through some of the most remote islands in the Indonesian archipelago: Morotai in the north, Merauke near the Papua New Guinea border, the Aru Islands, and dozens of communities that previously relied on satellite connections with latency measured in seconds rather than milliseconds.

Together, the three Palapa Ring segments span 10,380 km and connect 49 landing points across the archipelago. The project was completed in 2019, and its impact was immediate: eastern Indonesia finally had reliable, low-latency broadband for the first time.

Batam: Indonesia's Cable Megahub

If you drew a map of Indonesia's submarine cable connections, one dot would be so dense with lines that it would bleed into a solid circle: Batam.

This small island in the Riau archipelago, just 20 km south of Singapore across the Singapore Strait, is the landing point for at least 20 submarine cables — making it one of the most cable-dense locations in all of Asia. Batam connects to:

• Singapore — via B2JS, B3JS, BSCS, MIC-1, SEAX-1, Nongsa-Changi, Matrix, PGASCOM, RISING 8, INSICA, TIS, IGG, and more
• The rest of Indonesia — via Palapa Ring West, BTI-2, JaSuKa, TGCS
• International trunk cables — Apricot, ACC-1, AUG East, Candle, Hawaiki Nui 1
• Malaysia — via BaSICS (Batam-Sarawak) and BDM (Batam-Dumai-Melaka)

Batam exists because of a quirk of geography: it is the closest point of Indonesian territory to Singapore, the region's dominant internet exchange. Nearly all of Indonesia's international internet traffic passes through the Batam-Singapore corridor, making this 20 km strait one of the most critical chokepoints in Asian connectivity.

Jakarta: The Capital's Cable Portfolio

Jakarta itself is the landing point for 9 cables, including several of the newest and most strategically important:

• Bifrost (19,888 km, RFS 2025) — Meta and Keppel's massive cable connecting Singapore, Indonesia, and the US West Coast via the Pacific
• ACC-1 (19,000 km, RFS 2028) — Asia Connect Cable-1, linking Jakarta to Singapore, Darwin, and onward to Asia
• Hawaiki Nui 1 (10,000 km, RFS 2027) — connecting Jakarta to Australia and Singapore
• INDIGO-West (4,600 km, RFS 2019) — the Google-backed cable to Perth and Singapore
• B2JS and B3JS — the Jakarta-Bangka-Batam-Singapore corridor cables that carry much of Jakarta's Singapore-bound traffic

Jakarta's cable connections have grown dramatically since 2018. Before INDIGO-West, the capital's international connectivity depended heavily on Batam as a transit point. The new generation of cables landing directly in Jakarta gives the city — and its 11 million inhabitants — shorter paths to the global internet.

The Other Hubs: Makassar, Manado, Dumai, Surabaya

Makassar (6 cables) is the gateway to eastern Indonesia, sitting at the junction of Sulawesi, Kalimantan, and the Nusa Tenggara islands. The BTI-1, IGG, and TGCS cables all pass through here on their way east.

Manado (8 cables) at the northern tip of Sulawesi is Indonesia's connection point toward the Philippines and the Pacific. Bifrost, IGG, BTI-1, BTI-2, and Palapa Ring Middle all land here, making it the eastern hub for international traffic.

Dumai (7 cables) on Sumatra's east coast is the bridge to Malaysia and the Malacca Strait cables. SeaMeWe-5 — the massive Europe-to-Asia cable — makes landfall here, giving Dumai direct connectivity to 16 countries.

Surabaya (5 cables) is Java's eastern anchor, connecting through to Bali and Kalimantan via JAYABAYA, BTI-1, IGG, and the domestic Java-centric cables.

The International Layer

Indonesia's 30 international cables connect it to a ring of neighbors and, through them, to the world. The biggest:

The pattern is clear: Singapore is the default gateway. Almost every international cable touching Indonesia also lands in Singapore. This makes the Batam–Singapore strait not just important but existential for Indonesian connectivity. If that corridor were disrupted — by an anchor drag, an earthquake, or a shipping accident in one of the world's busiest waterways — Indonesia's international internet would be severely degraded.

Latency: What the Numbers Show

GeoCables monitors Indonesian cable health continuously. Here is what we measure from our probe network:

The Jakarta numbers look excellent: 16 ms to Singapore is world-class. But Makassar at 243+ ms from Singapore reveals the digital divide within Indonesia itself. Eastern Indonesia is still far from the global internet, even with the Palapa Ring in place. The cables exist, but the routing is often indirect — traffic from Makassar may transit through Jakarta before reaching Singapore, adding hundreds of milliseconds.

Alerts: B2JS Under Pressure

One cable has generated more alerts than any other in our Indonesian monitoring: Jakarta-Bangka-Batam-Singapore (B2JS).

In the past 30 days alone, B2JS has triggered multiple latency spike alerts:

• April 13, 2026: Critical alert — baseline 43 ms spiked to 83 ms (resolved)
• March 16, 2026: Three alerts in one day — baseline 44–117 ms spiking to 83–104 ms
• March 11, 2026: Critical alert — baseline 43 ms to 96 ms

B2JS is a relatively short cable (759 km) connecting Jakarta to Singapore through Bangka Island and Batam. It was commissioned in 2013 and carries a significant share of Jakarta's Singapore-bound traffic. The recurring alerts suggest that B2JS may be operating near capacity or experiencing periodic maintenance issues — a concern given how critical this corridor is.

RISING 8, a newer cable (RFS 2026, 1,104 km) connecting Singapore to Indonesia, has also shown warning-level spikes in April 2026, though less frequently.

The Domestic Backbone: A Network Within a Network

Indonesia's 42 domestic cables form a network that has no equivalent anywhere else in the world. They include:

• The Palapa Ring trilogy (West, Middle, East) — the government backbone connecting all major islands
• BTI-1 and BTI-2 (Barat-Timur Indonesia) — commercial east-west trunk cables operated by Moratelindo
• JAYABAYA — the Jakarta-Surabaya cable running along Java's north coast
• IGG (Indonesia Global Gateway) — a 5,300 km system connecting Java, Bali, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Batam, with an extension to Singapore
• SMPCS Packet-1 and Packet-2 — covering the remote eastern provinces from Sulawesi to Papua
• JaKa2LaDeMa — Java-Kalimantan-Bali corridor cable
• The "Link" series (Link 1-5, various phases) — a set of short-haul cables filling gaps between smaller islands

This domestic network must solve a problem that no other country faces at this scale: connecting thousands of islands spread across three time zones, in waters ranging from shallow coral reefs to deep ocean trenches, in a region prone to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and typhoons.

Earthquakes, Volcanos, and Anchor Drags

Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire. The same tectonic forces that created the archipelago also threaten its cables daily. The 2018 Palu earthquake and tsunami damaged submarine cable infrastructure in Sulawesi. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disrupted cables across the region. And the constant shipping traffic through the Malacca and Singapore Straits — among the busiest waterways on Earth — creates a persistent risk of anchor drags.

This is why redundancy matters so much. The Palapa Ring was designed with resilience in mind: each segment forms a ring topology, so a single cable break does not isolate any landing point. Traffic can route the other way around the ring. The international cables provide similar redundancy: with 30 cables connecting Indonesia to the outside world, the loss of any single cable — even a major one like SeaMeWe-5 — can be absorbed by rerouting through alternative paths.

But redundancy has limits. If the Batam–Singapore corridor were disrupted — multiple cables damaged simultaneously — Indonesia's international capacity would drop catastrophically. This concentration of risk in a single strait is the Achilles' heel of Indonesian connectivity.

What Is Coming Next

The next wave of cables will dramatically increase Indonesia's international capacity:

• Bifrost (2025) — Meta's transpacific cable, landing in Jakarta and Manado
• Echo (2025) — Google's cable through Indonesia to Guam and the US
• Apricot (2025) — connecting Indonesia to Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Singapore
• RISING 8 (2026) — a new Singapore-Indonesia link, adding capacity to the critical corridor
• INSICA (2026) — another Singapore-Indonesia cable (100 km, Batam–Singapore)
• Nongsa-Changi (2026) — 50 km direct link from Batam's Nongsa district to Singapore's Changi
• ACC-1 (2028) — Asia Connect Cable-1, a 19,000 km system through Jakarta
• Candle (2028) — 8,000 km cable via Batam
• AUG East (2029) — 8,900 km system through Batam
• Hawaiki Nui 1 (2027) — 10,000 km cable landing in Jakarta

The Big Tech investments — Meta (Bifrost), Google (Echo, Apricot) — signal that Indonesia's 280 million internet users are increasingly important to global platforms. These hyperscaler-backed cables bring not just bandwidth but also new landing points outside the traditional Batam corridor, gradually reducing the country's dependence on a single chokepoint.

Monitoring on GeoCables

GeoCables tracks cable health, latency, and alerts across Indonesia's submarine cable network. You can view real-time status of the Palapa Ring segments, the Batam–Singapore corridor, and international trunk cables on their individual cable pages.

See individual cable pages: Palapa Ring East · Palapa Ring Middle · Palapa Ring West · B2JS · Bifrost · SeaMeWe-5