On September 4, Vocus lost service on the Australia-Singapore Cable due to a fault in Indonesian waters. This came only weeks after the INDIGO West cable went down near Perth on August 8. Taken together, these two incidents mean that both of the direct submarine routes connecting Perth to Singapore are currently unavailable. Some Australia-Asia traffic has since been rerouted through longer paths via Japan or the United States, a workaround that increases latency between Australia and Singapore. Vocus has not yet announced a restoration date for the ASC.
This situation offers an important lesson about infrastructure, particularly for Indonesia given its position along the affected routes. Redundancy, it turns out, requires more than independent routes and landing points; it also depends on terrestrial backhaul and genuinely viable restoration options. When faults occur concurrently, as they have here, nominal spare capacity can lose its value very quickly.
Repair capability is therefore just as crucial an element of network resilience as the physical diversity of routes themselves. Vocus has stated that its repair planning depends on having spare materials on hand, coordinating marine operations, and securing the necessary permits and regulatory approvals. In practice, the speed of restoration is determined as much by operational readiness and administrative execution as by the technical fault itself.
Indonesia has encountered a similar challenge from a different angle. An anomaly in the Palapa Ring Tengah occurred at a depth of approximately 3,400 metres, caused by tectonic activity. Repairing it required a specialised vessel, the relevant administrative documents, sailing permits, and satellite capacity to bridge the restoration period. The parallel between this incident and the current Perth-Singapore outage is instructive: both show that the physical fault is often the easiest part of the problem, while the logistical and regulatory machinery needed to fix it can be the real bottleneck.
These episodes should prompt infrastructure teams to reconsider how they assess international capacity. Contracting a given number of terabits does not, by itself, define resilience. Physical topology, repair arrangements, alternative capacity, and recovery time all play a significant role in determining what that capacity is actually worth when something goes wrong. The same logic extends to data centres and cloud infrastructure more broadly: multi-carrier connectivity can still share common physical dependencies beneath the surface, which is why infrastructure due diligence needs to examine the actual routes behind each service rather than simply the number of providers or contracts involved.
Indonesia’s position within key regional cable corridors gives it a strategic advantage, one that can translate into real economic value when landing infrastructure, terrestrial routes, interconnections, and repair capabilities all function together as a cohesive system. Fast, reliable restoration is not just an operational matter either; it can shape future investment decisions in cable infrastructure, since investors and operators alike will favour markets where faults are resolved quickly and predictably.
Ultimately, this changes the question infrastructure planners should be asking. It is no longer enough to ask “how many cables do we have?” The more useful question is: “how much traffic can still be managed when two crucial routes fail simultaneously?” That is a far more meaningful measure of digital infrastructure resilience than raw cable counts or contracted capacity alone.
