CLEARER WATERS: INDONESIA CONSOLIDATES THE GOVERNANCE OF REGIONAL CABLE SYSTEMS By Marshall Jahja
ON 28 APRIL 2026, INDONESIA REPLACED THE NATIONAL BODY THAT COORDINATES SUBMARINE CABLES AND PIPELINES.
matters well beyond its own borders, and the April decree is the clearest signal in years of where that governance is heading.
WHY GOVERNANCE IS THE The team it dissolved, established BINDING CONSTRAINT only a year earlier, was set up to arrange routes. Its successor has a broader brief: to manage how submarine infrastructure is built and run across the country’s waters. That shift in wording carries real weight. It signals a move from passive corridor planning toward active governance over the full life of an asset the decree itself calls vital to national resilience and the wider economy. For much of the global subsea community, Indonesian regulation registers as background noise: a large market, growing fast, with a long-standing reputation for being hard to permit. Yet the country sits at one of the most consequential crossroads in the industry. It bridges the Indian and Pacific Oceans, lands a growing share of intra-Asia and trans-Pacific capacity, and serves a domestic market of more than 270 million people scattered across upward of 17,000 islands. How it governs the seabed therefore 64
In the trade press, regional and domestic cable systems tend to be discussed in the language of engineering: fiber pairs, repeater spacing, spectral efficiency, design capacity. All of that is the easy part. In an archipelagic state, what decides a project is rarely physical. It is institutional: who holds authority over a given stretch of seabed, which agency must consent before a survey vessel can mobilize, and how a route is reconciled with marine spatial plans, shipping lanes, fishing grounds, defence zones, and the pipelines and cables already in the water. A domestic system that reaches underserved regions has to cross many jurisdictional and sectoral boundaries to get to communities whose standalone economics are already marginal. Where coordination between those authorities is weak, timelines stretch and costs compound, and the very routes that would carry digital
SUBBTEL FORUM | Issue 149
infrastructure into emerging markets become the hardest to justify. The new framework is built to ease exactly that friction.
THE PERMITTING RECORD Indonesia’s reputation for difficulty deserves a closer look, because the time it takes tells a more encouraging story than the reputation does. An ASKALSI benchmark of cable permitting timelines puts Indonesia at around 580 days, roughly a year and five months from the first deployment proposal to a construction permit. That is quicker than Singapore and India, both near 820 days, quicker than the United States at about 835, and well inside Hong Kong at close to 1,090. Only a few markets, Thailand and Japan among them, clear the process faster (Figure 1). What developers experience as friction, then, has less to do with the calendar than with the number of doors that must be opened in sequence. A deployment proposal and route clearances through the national hydrographic authority, a seabed utilization permit, an environmental permit, a marine risk assessment, a construction permit, and a naviga-