Bima, Indonesia

Bima, Indonesia: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Bima is a coastal city situated on the eastern end of the island of Sumbawa, within Indonesia's province of West Nusa Tenggara. As a landing point on Indonesia's eastern island chain, Bima participates in the country's broader submarine cable network, which spans 70 cables across 139 landing points nationwide. One submarine cable lands at Bima, connecting it to other parts of the Indonesian archipelago through a domestic, intra-country corridor.

The single cable serving Bima is the Mataram Kupang Cable System (MKCS), which links multiple locations entirely within Indonesia. This places Bima within a regional inter-island connectivity framework, providing submarine cable infrastructure to a city that serves as the largest urban centre on the island of Sumbawa.

Cables Landing at Bima

The Mataram Kupang Cable System (MKCS) is the sole submarine cable landing at Bima. Stretching 1,318 kilometres, the system reached ready-for-service status in 2011 and connects multiple landing points exclusively within Indonesia. As its name suggests, the cable runs between Mataram and Kupang, with Bima forming one of the intermediate landing points along this domestic route. The MKCS provides inter-island connectivity across the Lesser Sunda Islands, linking Sumbawa to other islands in the Nusa Tenggara region of eastern Indonesia.

Regional Context

Within Indonesia's submarine cable landscape, Bima is a single-cable landing point, placing it among the smaller nodes in a country that hosts up to 20 cables at its most connected landing point, Batam. Major hubs such as Jakarta, Tanjung Pakis, and Manado each serve between eight and nine cables, while Makassar and Dumai handle six and seven respectively. Bima's single-cable presence nonetheless positions it within the top 62 percent of Indonesia's 139 landing points by cable count, reflecting how distributed and varied the country's submarine cable geography is across its island archipelago.

Network Role

Bima functions as a single-cable terminus on the Mataram Kupang Cable System, serving an inter-island domestic corridor across the Lesser Sunda Islands. The MKCS route connects Sumbawa to neighbouring islands in the Nusa Tenggara region, and Bima's position on the eastern side of Sumbawa makes it a natural waypoint along this east-west cable path. The landing point does not currently serve any international cable connections; its role is entirely within Indonesia's intra-archipelago network.

In the broader Indonesian submarine cable graph, Bima represents the category of geographically distributed landing points that extend connectivity to island communities beyond the major western hubs. With 165,000 residents and a position as Sumbawa's largest city, Bima's place on the MKCS anchors submarine cable access to a part of eastern Indonesia that would otherwise lie at greater distance from the country's principal cable corridors.