Indonesia
Indonesia's submarine cable network reflects the demands of a sprawling archipelago stretching across three time zones. Multiple active systems converge on the country, though landing point documentation remains incomplete.
Connectivity at a glance
- Cable systems
- 9active
- Landing points
- 0
- Resilience score
- 81
Cable systems serving Indonesia
Landing points
Landing point records for Indonesia are being compiled.
An archipelago wired by sea
Few countries present a more demanding geography for submarine cable planners than Indonesia. Spread across more than seventeen thousand islands between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the country sits at a natural crossroads for cables transiting between East Asia, South Asia, Australia and the Americas. That position makes Indonesia both a traffic hub and a country with genuinely complex internal connectivity requirements.
The cable mix
The Coral Sea Cables register documents ten systems with Indonesian landings: ACC-1, AIS, BDM, BRCS, BSCS, JAKABARE, SCAN, SJC and TIS are all active, while ASEAN has been retired from service. The breadth of that active list suggests meaningful route diversity — traffic can be distributed across several independent systems rather than depending on a single path. That kind of redundancy matters in a region where seismic activity and fishing activity both pose ongoing risks to cable infrastructure.
The retired ASEAN system is a reminder that the cable landscape is not static. Older systems reach the end of their economic or technical lives and are replaced, usually by higher-capacity successors that carry more traffic on fewer physical fibres.
Geography as both asset and constraint
Indonesia's position along major transoceanic routes means that cable operators have strong commercial reasons to include the country in their systems. The Strait of Malacca, the waters north of Java, and the passages through the eastern archipelago are among the most cable-dense corridors in the world. For Indonesia, this translates into access to systems that also serve Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia and points beyond — providing onward connectivity that a more isolated geography would make far harder to achieve.
At the same time, the sheer scale of the archipelago means that cable landings are likely concentrated in a small number of major coastal cities, with the outer islands dependent on domestic terrestrial and wireless networks, or on separate regional cable links, to reach the international backbone.
Landing point data
The specific landing points for these systems within Indonesia have not yet been documented in the Coral Sea Cables register. Work to compile verified landing point data for the country is ongoing. Until that record is complete, the full picture of which coastal locations anchor Indonesia's international cable connections — and which parts of the country benefit most directly from submarine capacity — remains to be mapped.