Buranga, Indonesia

Buranga, Indonesia: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Buranga is the administrative capital of North Buton Regency in Southeast Sulawesi Province, situated on the northern part of Buton Island in eastern Indonesia. As a coastal settlement within one of Indonesia's island-rich eastern provinces, Buranga serves as a landing point for submarine cable infrastructure connecting parts of the Indonesian archipelago. One submarine cable lands at Buranga, linking it into the broader domestic network that spans the country's thousands of islands.

The single cable serving Buranga is the Palapa Ring Middle, a domestic Indonesian submarine cable system. This connection places Buranga within a corridor of intra-Indonesian connectivity, enabling communication links between geographically dispersed communities across the archipelago rather than connecting to international or intercontinental routes.

Cables Landing at Buranga

The Palapa Ring Middle is an Indonesian domestic submarine cable system with a total length of 2,100 kilometres. It reached ready-for-service status in 2018. All endpoints on the Palapa Ring Middle are located within Indonesia, making it a purely domestic cable designed to extend connectivity across the Indonesian archipelago. Buranga represents one of the landing points along this ring system, which links multiple Indonesian coastal communities and islands through a single networked cable route.

Regional Context

Within Indonesia's submarine cable landscape, Buranga hosts one cable, placing it among the smaller landing points in the country. Indonesia's cable infrastructure spans 70 submarine cables across 139 landing points, and major hubs such as Batam (20 cables), Jakarta (9 cables), and Tanjung Pakis (9 cables) serve as the primary concentration points for international and domestic traffic. Buranga's single-cable presence reflects its role as a local access point rather than a major exchange node, consistent with many of Indonesia's 139 landing points that serve geographically remote island communities.

Network Role

Buranga functions as a single-cable terminus on the Palapa Ring Middle system, connecting North Buton Regency on Buton Island to the domestic submarine cable network that extends across Indonesia. The Palapa Ring Middle's 2,100-kilometre route serves exclusively Indonesian endpoints, meaning Buranga's connectivity is oriented entirely toward intra-archipelago communication rather than international exchange. This reflects a pattern common across Indonesia's eastern island regions, where domestic ring cable systems extend reach to communities that lie far from the country's major international cable hubs.

Within the broader Indonesian submarine cable graph, Buranga represents one of many single-cable landing points distributed across the archipelago, illustrating how domestic cable systems complement the large international hubs concentrated in western Indonesia by providing connectivity to more remote island populations.