Kaimana, Indonesia

Kaimana: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Kaimana is a small port town and the capital of Kaimana Regency, located in West Papua, Indonesia. Situated on the eastern reaches of the Indonesian archipelago, it serves as a submarine cable landing point connecting it to Indonesia's broader domestic cable network. One submarine cable currently lands at Kaimana, linking the town to other points within Indonesia through an intra-national corridor.

The single cable serving Kaimana is the SMPCS Packet-2, a domestic system that spans 3,498 kilometres and connects multiple Indonesian locations. For a town of Kaimana's scale, with a population of around 16,718 in mid-2022, the presence of even one submarine cable represents a tangible connection to the national telecommunications grid through undersea infrastructure.

Cables Landing at Kaimana

SMPCS Packet-2 is a 3,498-kilometre submarine cable system that reached ready-for-service status in 2015, initially listed as a draft system. It connects landing points entirely within Indonesia, making it a purely domestic cable. Kaimana is one of the Indonesian endpoints on this system, placing the town within a chain of Indonesian locations served by this cable. No additional technical specifications beyond its length and RFS year are associated with this system in available records.

Regional Context

Within Indonesia's submarine cable landscape, which encompasses 70 cables across 139 landing points, Kaimana ranks among the more lightly served locations. Major Indonesian hubs such as Batam, which hosts 20 cables, and Jakarta and Tanjung Pakis, each hosting 9 cables, handle significantly higher volumes of cable traffic. Kaimana's single cable places it in the upper 62% of Indonesian landing points by cable count, reflecting its role as a local access point rather than a regional aggregation hub.

Network Role

Kaimana functions as a single-cable terminus on the SMPCS Packet-2 system, a domestic Indonesian cable that draws together several locations across the archipelago. Rather than serving as a transit or aggregation node, Kaimana represents an endpoint in this intra-national corridor, receiving connectivity from a cable that spans nearly 3,500 kilometres along Indonesian waters. The 2015 RFS date of its only cable means Kaimana entered Indonesia's submarine cable map relatively recently compared to the country's first cable in 2003.

In the broader Indonesian submarine cable graph, Kaimana illustrates the role of smaller, eastern Indonesian towns that are reached through dedicated domestic cable systems rather than through the large intercontinental routes that concentrate around western hubs such as Batam and Jakarta. Its presence on SMPCS Packet-2 places West Papua within a nationally oriented submarine cable structure designed to extend connectivity across one of the world's most geographically dispersed archipelagos.