Lakudo, Indonesia

Lakudo, Indonesia: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Lakudo is a location in Central Buton Regency, Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia. Situated within an archipelagic nation of more than 17,000 islands, it serves as a submarine cable landing point on one of Indonesia's inner sea corridors. One submarine cable lands at Lakudo, connecting it to other points within the Indonesian archipelago.

The single cable landing here, Palapa Ring Middle, is a domestic system that links Indonesian locations exclusively, making Lakudo part of an intra-national connectivity corridor. This positions the landing point as a node in the broader effort to extend submarine cable infrastructure across Indonesia's more dispersed island groups, including those in the Sulawesi region.

Cables Landing at Lakudo

Palapa Ring Middle is a submarine cable system with a length of 2,100 km that reached ready-for-service status in 2018. All endpoints on this cable are located within Indonesia, making it a domestic ring system designed to interconnect Indonesian islands and regions. Lakudo represents one of the landing points along this circuit, linking it into a network that spans multiple Indonesian locations via a single continuous undersea cable route.

Regional Context

Indonesia hosts 70 submarine cables across 139 landing points, with major hubs such as Batam (20 cables), Jakarta (9 cables), and Tanjung Pakis (9 cables) representing the most connected locations in the country. Lakudo, with one cable landing, ranks in the top 62 percent of Indonesian landing points by cable count, reflecting the reality that the majority of Indonesia's 139 landing points serve as single-cable or low-count nodes rather than large interchange hubs. Its position in Southeast Sulawesi places it among the more geographically distributed tier of landing points that extend domestic cable coverage beyond the major western Indonesian population centers.

Network Role

Lakudo functions as a single-cable terminus, anchored entirely to the Palapa Ring Middle system. That cable's domestic scope means Lakudo's connectivity role is oriented inward, facilitating data transmission between Indonesian islands rather than providing international gateway access. The 2,100 km length of Palapa Ring Middle reflects the scale of the geographic distances involved in connecting Indonesia's dispersed island territories by undersea cable.

As one node among many along a domestic ring topology, Lakudo contributes to the redundancy and reach of the Palapa Ring Middle system across the Sulawesi sub-region. In the broader Indonesian submarine cable graph, single-cable landing points like Lakudo represent the outermost layer of the country's undersea network, extending coverage to island communities that would otherwise rely solely on terrestrial or satellite links.