Indonesia coverage

What the Indonesia numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 38 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 7 Mbps, is the one that matters. It is the speed in the worst tenth of the day, when the cell above the station is full and everybody around you is on it too. A country with a high median and a low floor is a country that works beautifully right up until the moment you actually need it.

If the trip depends on video calls or tethering, plan around the busy figure rather than the typical one.

What happens in Indonesia when the network is busy

Congestion is not a fault, it is a Tuesday evening. The question is what your eSIM can do about it, and for most travel eSIMs the answer is nothing: one wholesale agreement per country, one network, and no way out except buying a second eSIM from somebody else while standing in the street.

Here, Orbislo traffic runs over Telkomsel and XL. When the network you are on degrades we move you to another one, mid trip, without you asking, and tell you afterwards rather than interrupting you at the time.

Mobile operators in Indonesia

• Telkomsel: Telkomsel, the mobile arm of the Telkom group, reported 153.5 million mobile customers at the end of June 2026, with average revenue per mobile customer of 45,600 rupiah.
• Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison: Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison reported 93.4 million mobile customers for the six months to 30 June 2026, with data traffic up 19.9 percent on a year earlier.
• XLSmart: XLSmart was formed when Smartfren Telecom and Smart Telecom merged into XL Axiata. The digital ministry approved the combined company on 17 April 2025, when it had about 95 million users.
• XLSmart: The ministry attached conditions to the XLSmart merger, including a 16 percent rise in download speeds by 2029 and digital services for more than 175,000 schools, 8,000 health facilities and 42,000 government offices.

Older networks in Indonesia

• Telkomsel finished switching off 3G in June 2023, after converting the 3G layer on more than 49,000 base stations to 4G across all 504 cities and regencies. The programme began in March 2022, and a phone that needs 3G for data has no 3G layer to use on Telkomsel.
• 2G has not been retired on Telkomsel. At the end of June 2026 it ran about 301,000 base stations, of which roughly 246,000 were 4G, 6,000 were 5G and 49,000 were still 2G.
• When its 3G switch off finished in June 2023, Telkomsel said more than 96 percent of Indonesia's populated areas were served by its 4G network.

5G in Indonesia

• Telkomsel was the first operator cleared to run 5G in Indonesia, receiving its certificate of operational fitness from the ministry on 21 May 2021. Commercial 5G started on 27 May 2021 on the 2.3 GHz band, at first in a limited set of locations.
• Indosat launched its first commercial 5G service in Solo on 22 June 2021, with coverage also in Jakarta, Surabaya, Makassar and Balikpapan. Customers needed a 4G SIM registered for 5G and a data package that included 5G.
• In the July 2026 auction of the 700 MHz band, XLSmart won 2x15 MHz for 1.06 trillion rupiah, Telkomsel 2x10 MHz for 642.5 billion rupiah and Indosat 2x10 MHz for 507.48 billion rupiah.
• In the same 2026 selection for the 2.6 GHz band, Telkomsel won 80 MHz, Indosat 60 MHz and XLSmart 50 MHz of mid band spectrum.
• Winners of the 2026 700 MHz and 2.6 GHz licences must bring at least 4G mobile broadband to villages chosen from a list of 538, and provide 5G in their committed cities and regencies to reach at least 51 percent of the national population.

Network notes for Indonesia

• The state built Palapa Ring fibre backbone opened in October 2019. Its 12,128 kilometres link 57 regencies and cities in 11 provinces that operators found commercially unviable, completing a fibre network that reaches 514 regencies and cities.
• The eastern Palapa Ring package, the hardest to build, connects 35 service regencies and cities across East Nusa Tenggara, Maluku, Papua and West Papua. It finished later than planned because of Papua's terrain.
• On 30 April 2021 a break in the Sulawesi Maluku Papua Cable System on the Biak to Sarmi segment cut Telkom services around Jayapura. Calls and SMS came back that evening, while mobile and fixed data recovered gradually over satellite, radio links and Palapa Ring.
• In December 2025 the digital ministry counted about 2,500 villages still without internet access and set 2026 as the target year for connecting all of them.