Intelligence Brief: In late 2025, Telin and regional partners accelerated plans for Indonesia Cable Express II (ICE II): a high-capacity subsea system designed to connect Singapore ↔ Manado and extend into East Malaysia via new landing points. For Indonesia, this is a strategic upgrade: more international capacity, better redundancy, and a credible backbone for AI-era bandwidth demand.
01. The Logic: Bandwidth for the AI Economy
AI workloads, cloud replication, and data-intensive platforms change the baseline: international bandwidth is no longer a “nice to have.” ICE II is being positioned as a state-of-the-art capacity layer that supports hyperscale compute and cross-border traffic growth.
Redundancy
New routes reduce reliance on single corridors. This matters for financial rails, government platforms, and cloud service SLAs.
Regional Integration
Connecting Manado with Singapore and East Malaysia creates a North–South digital corridor—an alternative to Java-centric routing.
02. The Product: A New Set of Landing Points
ICE II is being developed with partners to broaden the system’s footprint. New landing points in East Malaysia (Sarawak/Sabah) increase the system’s commercial viability and route options—good for carriers, good for cloud, good for enterprise.
Strategic Outcome
More landing points = more peering options = more competitive transit pricing. Over time, this can compress network costs for startups and improve QoS for “outside Java” markets.
03. Startup Implication: Edge + Cross-Border Growth
When international capacity improves, the second-order winners are not telecom operators—it’s the businesses that become viable at scale: BPO, gaming, content platforms, cross-border fintech, and logistics with real-time systems.
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Edge Compute and Regional PoPs Expect more regional points-of-presence around gateway cities and industrial zones as bandwidth + power + land packaging improves.
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Latency-Sensitive Markets Gaming, live commerce, and real-time analytics benefit directly—lower latency widens product feasibility beyond top-tier metro areas.
Analyst Outlook
"ICE II is a classic ‘invisible’ moat: users don’t see it, but digital economies run on it. The strategic value is redundancy and northbound capacity—making Eastern Indonesia a credible gateway for compute and cross-border traffic in the AI era."