Indonesia’s Internet Is Hard to Reach. Here’s Why.
With more than 200 million Internet users, Indonesia is the fourth most populous country on Earth. Yet its geography, infrastructure, and market dynamics have long made it one of the most difficult places to deliver fast, reliable connectivity. IP transit there runs, on average, about six times more expensive than at major Southeast Asian interconnection hubs. The country’s 18,000-plus islands span three time zones and stretch roughly 3,200 miles (5,100 km) from east to west—a distance greater than the breadth of the continental United States. Much of that archipelago sits far from Singapore, the region’s dominant Internet hub with over 60% of its data centers.
Internet traffic in and out of Indonesia relies heavily on submarine cables. Twenty-two separate systems currently link the country to Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and beyond. Many of these traverse the Strait of Malacca, among the world’s five busiest shipping lanes. Anchor drops, fishing trawlers, and dredging regularly threaten cable integrity, and the area is also seismically active. New cable builds—including Apricot, ACC-1, Echo, and Nui—are expected to add capacity and improve economics, but for now costs remain steep. A 100Gbps wavelength between Jakarta and Singapore is roughly 60 times more expensive than a comparable distance in the continental US or Europe; the Hong Kong-to-Taiwan route, of similar length, costs about one-sixth as much.
Fragmentation at the Interconnection Layer
Jakarta remains Indonesia’s most mature data center market. Cloudflare operates from the NTT NexCenter facility there, but a curious problem sits just 30–50 meters away. Most of the country’s ISPs are concentrated in the neighboring Cyber 1 building, and the two facilities are difficult to interconnect. The lobby directory at Cyber 1 lists dozens of distinct data centers, each with its own policies and access conditions—a fragmentation that complicates even short-distance connectivity.
Market concentration compounds the problem. The three largest providers—Telkom Indonesia, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, and XL Axiata—control roughly 80% of the market, with Telkom alone accounting for around 60% of revenue by that measure. That dominance gives Telkom leverage to refuse local peering without expensive settlement fees, or to prefer exchanging traffic outside the country, which adds latency and degrades performance.
Building a Local Footprint
Despite these obstacles, Cloudflare’s presence in Indonesia has expanded steadily since its first Jakarta deployment in 2019:
- A carrier-neutral point of presence at the NTT NexCenter data center in Jakarta
- An edge partnership point of presence in Yogyakarta with CitranetIX
- Direct in-country interconnections with two of the top three networks
- Peering at three major local exchanges: Indonesia Internet Exchange, Jakarta Internet Exchange, and Biznet Internet Exchange
- Dedicated 100G wavelength transport back to Singapore
Performance benchmarks show measurable gains. In December 2021, Cloudflare was faster than other providers on only a few Indonesian networks. Twelve months later, its edge was both wider and deeper, with a 16% year-on-year improvement in measured performance. Against the three largest ISPs specifically, Cloudflare ranked as the top provider on two of the three networks for connection time and time-to-last-byte measures.
What’s Next
Plans for further expansion include connecting to more local networks, investing in submarine cable capacity, and entering new data center buildings, exchanges, and cities. Operators who don’t yet peer with Cloudflare can use the company’s Peering Portal to arrange interconnection or request a direct node deployment.
