Nabire, Indonesia

Nabire: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Nabire is a town located in the Indonesian province of Central Papua, situated at the western end of New Guinea. As a coastal settlement on one of the world's largest islands, Nabire forms part of Indonesia's expansive submarine cable network, which spans 139 landing points across the archipelago. One submarine cable lands at Nabire, connecting this eastern Indonesian town to the broader national network through an entirely domestic corridor.

The single cable serving Nabire is the Palapa Ring East, a significant domestic infrastructure project that links multiple points across the Indonesian archipelago. Its presence in Nabire reflects Indonesia's national effort to extend submarine cable connectivity into the eastern reaches of the country, including the island of New Guinea, which has historically been among the less connected parts of the nation.

Cables Landing at Nabire

The Palapa Ring East is a 6,300-kilometre submarine cable system that reached ready-for-service status in 2019. All endpoints on this cable are located within Indonesia, making it a purely domestic system designed to improve connectivity across the country's outer and eastern island regions. The cable's considerable length reflects the geographic scale of the Indonesian archipelago it serves, spanning thousands of kilometres between Indonesian landing points. Nabire represents one stop along this eastern ring, integrating Central Papua into the national submarine cable topology.

Regional Context

Within Indonesia's network of 139 submarine cable landing points, Nabire hosts a single cable, placing it in the top 62 percent of Indonesian landing points by cable count. Major Indonesian hubs such as Batam with 20 cables, Jakarta with 9 cables, and Manado with 8 cables handle substantially higher cable volumes, reflecting their roles as international and inter-island gateways. Nabire's connectivity, by contrast, is focused on domestic reach rather than high-volume international exchange.

Network Role

Nabire functions as a single-cable terminus on the Palapa Ring East system, serving as a landing point that extends domestic submarine cable connectivity into Central Papua on the island of New Guinea. Its role is oriented entirely toward intra-Indonesian connectivity, linking a geographically remote town on New Guinea to the rest of the archipelago through a dedicated national ring system. The 6,300-kilometre length of the Palapa Ring East underscores the distances involved in reaching eastern Indonesian communities by undersea cable.

Within the broader Indonesian submarine cable graph, Nabire represents one of many outer landing points that together ensure the Palapa Ring East fulfils its purpose of extending domestic network reach across the country's most distant eastern regions.