Masohi, Indonesia

Masohi: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Masohi is a coastal town located on the island of Seram in the Maluku province of Indonesia, serving as the capital of Central Maluku Regency. As a landing point for submarine cable infrastructure, Masohi connects this eastern Indonesian island community into the broader national undersea network. One submarine cable lands at Masohi, the SMPCS Packet-1, which forms part of a domestic Indonesian connectivity corridor.

The single cable serving Masohi operates entirely within Indonesia, linking Seram to other points across the Indonesian archipelago. This reflects the inter-island character of the landing point, which supports domestic connectivity across one of the world's most geographically fragmented nations. With Indonesia spanning thousands of islands, submarine cables such as SMPCS Packet-1 play a direct role in bridging communities separated by open sea.

Cables Landing at Masohi

SMPCS Packet-1 is a submarine cable with a total length of 3,156 kilometres that reached ready-for-service (RFS) status in 2015, with a draft status designation. The cable connects multiple landing points within Indonesia, making it a purely domestic system rather than an international route. With a length exceeding the Indonesian average cable length of 2,814 kilometres, SMPCS Packet-1 represents a relatively long intra-national route, suggesting it spans a significant portion of the archipelago to reach Masohi on Seram island.

Regional Context

Within Indonesia's submarine cable landscape, which encompasses 70 cables landing across 139 landing points, Masohi hosts a single cable and ranks within the top 62 percent of Indonesian landing points by cable count. The major hubs of the country - Batam with 20 cables, Jakarta and Tanjung Pakis each with 9, and Manado with 8 - serve as far more heavily connected nodes, while Masohi represents the category of smaller, single-cable landing points that collectively extend connectivity into Indonesia's more remote island regions. Its nearest major peer in eastern Indonesia is Makassar, which hosts 6 cables.

Network Role

Masohi functions as a single-cable terminus within the Indonesian domestic submarine cable network. Its connection via SMPCS Packet-1 enables the town of Masohi and the surrounding Central Maluku Regency on Seram island to access undersea connectivity that would otherwise be unavailable given the island's separation from the Indonesian mainland and major hub islands. The landing point does not serve as a transit or branching node; rather, it is an endpoint that extends the reach of domestic cable infrastructure into an eastern island community.

In the broader Indonesian submarine cable graph, Masohi illustrates how domestic inter-island cable systems distribute connectivity beyond the major western hubs, ensuring that smaller population centres in the Maluku region maintain a physical undersea link to the national network.