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 an Indonesian landing point, it forms part of the country's extensive submarine cable network, which spans 70 cables across 139 landing points nationwide. One submarine cable lands at Nabire, connecting it to the broader domestic telecommunications infrastructure of Indonesia.

The single cable serving Nabire is the Palapa Ring East, an intra-Indonesian system that links multiple landing points within the archipelago. This cable establishes Nabire as a node in the domestic corridor running through eastern Indonesia, providing connectivity within one of the world's most geographically dispersed nations.

Cables Landing at Nabire

The Palapa Ring East is the sole submarine cable landing at Nabire. Stretching 6,300 kilometres, it reached ready-for-service status in 2019. All other endpoints on this cable are also located within Indonesia, making it a purely domestic system designed to extend submarine connectivity to Indonesian territories across the eastern part of the archipelago. Nabire's position along this cable places it as one of several landing points woven into this regional ring configuration.

Regional Context

Among Indonesia's 139 submarine cable landing points, Nabire hosts a single cable, placing it in the top 62 percent of Indonesian landing points by cable count. Compared to major Indonesian hubs such as Batam, which serves 20 cables, or Jakarta and Tanjung Pakis, each serving 9, Nabire represents a more modest but geographically significant point of connectivity on the eastern fringe of the national network. Its role is distinct from high-density western Indonesian hubs, reflecting the reach of domestic cable infrastructure into Central Papua.

Network Role

Nabire functions as a single-cable terminus within the Palapa Ring East system, contributing to the domestic submarine cable loop that serves the eastern regions of Indonesia. Rather than acting as a multi-cable hub bridging international corridors, Nabire's role is that of a domestic endpoint, extending the reach of Indonesian submarine infrastructure into Central Papua on the island of New Guinea.

Within the broader Indonesian submarine cable graph, landing points such as Nabire illustrate how domestic ring systems are engineered to reach geographically remote provincial towns that would otherwise depend solely on terrestrial or satellite links. The presence of the Palapa Ring East at Nabire reflects Indonesia's approach to distributing submarine cable access across its far-flung eastern territories.