Telkom Indonesia’s international arm Telin announced on Friday it has signed a MoU with Singtel to develop a new subsea cable system connecting Singapore and Indonesia to support the booming data centre market in both countries.
Under the newly formed INSICA (Indonesia Singapore Cable System) Consortium, Telin and Singtel will build and operate the 100-km INSICA cable system that will run between Singapore and Batam. The INSICA cable will feature 24 fibre pairs and two diverse terrestrial cable paths, offering a maximum capacity of up to 20 Tbps per fibre pair.
Telin CEO Budi Satria Dharma Purba said that apart from the boost in bandwidth, the new subsea cable will enable efficient resource sharing and scalability, enhance network protection and reliability for data centres.
“The global submarine cable market is poised for unprecedented growth over the next decade, positioning Batam and Singapore as prime locations for data centre investments,” he said. “The INSICA submarine cable will address the critical need for data centre interconnectivity among these key strategic locations.”
Ooi Seng Keat, VP of digital infrastructure and services at Singtel, said, “With this cable system, we’ll be able to enhance the connectivity between the countries to support the intensive, higher power density AI workloads of enterprises and cloud companies.”
Direct connectivity between data centres will also support the deployment of emerging technologies, such as the Internet of Things and robotics, edge computing and 5G, that require high bandwidth and low latency for commercial-scale and real-time applications, he added.
The INSICA cable is planned to be operational in the fourth quarter of 2026.