RISING 8

Based on 88 RIPE Atlas measurements from GeoCables monitoring infrastructure, March–April 2026.

RISING 8 is a 1,104-kilometre regional submarine cable that connects Changi North in Singapore to two Indonesian landing points: Tanjung Pakis on the Java coast and Tanjung Bemban on the Riau Archipelago. It came into service in 2026 and is one of the newest regional cables operating in the Singapore-Indonesia corridor. The system is built and owned by two Indonesian domestic carriers — Moratelindo (PT Mora Telematika Indonesia) and Triasmitra (PT Triasmitra Multi Media) — without consortium involvement from international Tier-1 operators. As such, RISING 8 fits squarely into a multi-decade pattern of Indonesian carriers building owned outbound capacity to Singapore on private balance-sheet investment, in parallel with regional consortium cables that already cross the same waters.

The Singapore-Indonesia corridor is one of the densest submarine cable corridors in the world. Singapore's role as the principal Southeast Asian peering hub means that a substantial fraction of Indonesian outbound internet traffic transits through Singapore exchanges before reaching its global destinations. Indonesian carriers have responded over the past two decades by laying their own submarine routes to Singapore rather than relying on foreign-owned capacity: Matrix Cable System in 2008, BRCS (Batam-Rengit) in 2007, DMCS (Dumai-Melaka) in 2005, and several others. RISING 8 is the latest entry in that pattern. The cable's specific role appears to be as a domestic Indonesian backbone with a Singapore tail: of its three landings, two are inside Indonesia (Java and Riau), and only one is outside. The Singapore landing primarily exists to deliver Indonesian-origin traffic into Singapore's peering ecosystem, not to provide a generic transit link between two countries.

The first-year measurement profile

Across 88 measurements from Changi North in Singapore to Tanjung Pakis on the Java coast, the round-trip averages 78.23 ms, with a minimum of 14.22 ms, a maximum of 224.06 ms, and a standard deviation of 44.67 ms. The physics floor for the 1,104-kilometre Singapore-to-Tanjung-Pakis segment is approximately 10.80 ms. The minimum we observe sits at 1.317× of that floor — close to optimal, what a clean single-cable transit would produce. But the average sits at almost 7.25× of the floor, and the maximum at over twenty times the floor. The path is doing one thing well in the best case and a very different thing in the worst case, with most observations spread across the range in between.

This profile is not anomalous. It is what regional cables in their first year of service routinely produce on the Singapore-Indonesia corridor, and the explanation lies in routing rather than in cable behaviour. The Singapore-side carriers that originate the traffic we measure are not all using RISING 8 to reach Tanjung Pakis. Some sessions go through the cable directly, registering at minimum near the floor; others are routed via Singapore's domestic peering fabric onto alternative submarine paths — Matrix, DMCS, BBG, or others — and reach the Indonesian destination by a longer or less direct route. Because RISING 8 is brand new, BGP advertisements pointing to it are still being absorbed into route-selection policies across the Singapore-side carrier base. The cable is competing for traffic against established peers, and many sessions still default to the older paths that have been part of standard Singapore-Indonesia routing for over a decade.

Over the cable's first year and beyond, the standard expectation is that this variance will compress as Singapore-side route policies absorb RISING 8 into their preferred-path lists for the Indonesian destinations the cable serves. The minimum will continue to sit at the floor — that is a property of the wet plant, not of routing — but the average and maximum will trend down toward the minimum as more of the SG→ID traffic on this specific origin-destination pair is committed to the new cable. This convergence is what we have observed historically on Matrix, BRCS, and DMCS as each entered service: their first-year variance was substantial and decayed over the subsequent two-to-three years as carrier route policies stabilised.

What 1.317× tells us when the route does use the cable

The 14.22 ms minimum is the meaningful number for understanding RISING 8 as a piece of physical infrastructure. At minimum the route sits at 1.317× of the 1,104-km physics floor — about 32% above theoretical, which is normal for short regional cables once you account for the fibre's slight over-length above great-circle distance plus per-kilometre regenerator and amplifier latency. Matrix Cable System on the Jakarta-Singapore segment sits at 1.376× of its own floor when it carries traffic — a closely comparable result on a similar regional geometry. Both numbers describe well-engineered regional submarine cables operating near their physical limits when the route policy actually commits to them.

The contrast with longer transpacific systems is instructive. JUNO, the brand-new transpacific cable connecting Hermosa Beach in California to Shima in Japan, sits at 1.010× of its own physics floor — practically on the limit. AJC, the long-serving Australia-Japan-via-Guam cable from 2001, sits at 0.935× of its multi-segment floor, which is a different geometric regime altogether. RISING 8 at 1.317× operates in a third regime — short regional cable, single-direction measurement, first year of service. Each cable's relationship to its floor reflects the structural geometry of its route and the maturity of its place in the regional routing fabric.

Changi North as the Singapore-Indonesia gateway

The choice of Changi North as RISING 8's Singapore landing places the cable into the busiest concentration of Indonesia-bound submarine cables in Singapore. Changi-side landings are the standard Singapore terminus for Indonesian regional cables: Matrix, BRCS, B2JS and several others all share the same coastal cluster, and the Changi peering ecosystem on the Singapore mainland connects them to the Singapore Internet Exchange (SGIX) and the major content delivery networks that serve Southeast Asia from the city. RISING 8's traffic enters this same fabric, and the small differences in landing-station choice between Changi North, Changi South, and the smaller Tuas landings primarily reflect physical land-use availability and timing of approval rather than meaningful network-topology differences.

On the Indonesian side, the dual landings — Tanjung Pakis on Java and Tanjung Bemban on Riau Archipelago — give RISING 8 the Indonesian backbone profile. Indonesia's submarine cable network has more than 140 landing points distributed across the archipelago, and the country's domestic carriers have been steadily building inter-island cables alongside their Singapore-bound capacity. RISING 8's combination of one Singapore landing and two Indonesian landings means it functions both as outbound transit and as a domestic Indonesian backbone segment, which is the modern Indonesian regional-cable design pattern.

What to watch as the cable matures

The interesting measurement to track on RISING 8 over the next eighteen months is the trajectory of the standard deviation. The current 44.67 ms reflects the cable's youth: BGP route selection is still distributed across multiple alternatives, and the cable is one option among several. As Singapore-side carriers accumulate operational experience with the cable and update their route policies, we should see the standard deviation compress and the average migrate toward the minimum. The cable will reach a measurement steady state when most Singapore-side traffic destined for the Java coast actually transits through RISING 8 instead of being load-balanced across the older alternatives. That convergence is what we have measured on every similar cable in this corridor over the past two decades, and it is what we expect to continue measuring on RISING 8 as it settles into the regional fabric.

For now, the headline is that a brand-new Indonesia-owned regional cable has lit, has begun carrying traffic, and at minimum is performing as the engineering brief required: 14.22 ms across 1,104 kilometres of submarine fibre, 32% above the theoretical limit on a short trunk. The variance is the story of routing politics absorbing a new option into a mature corridor — that part will resolve in time. The cable itself, when used, works.