ASEAN’s Submarine Cables: Guidelines Are No Longer Enough — We Need Real Protection

We all feel it every day: a glitchy video call with a supplier in Ho Chi Minh City, a delayed payment confirmation from a buyer in Bangkok, a slow-loading e-commerce dashboard for customers in Jakarta. These small frustrations add up — and they often trace back to one fragile thread: the submarine cables carrying our internet traffic across the ocean floor. For businesses across ASEAN, reliable connectivity is no longer a nice-to-have. It is infrastructure as critical as electricity, roads or ports.

The 2019 ASEAN Guidelines for Strengthening Resilience and Repair of Submarine Cables were a well-intentioned first step. They encouraged transparency, single points of contact and faster permitting — targeting repairs in 7–10 working days. But six years later, with digital dependency only growing and new cables being laid at pace, those voluntary guidelines feel increasingly inadequate. Permit delays, inconsistent rules and high fees still slow repairs. When a cable is damaged, businesses don’t just lose connectivity — they lose revenue, momentum and trust.

From an Indonesian vantage point, the vulnerability hits close to home. Our chain of 17,000 islands relies on these cables for everything: real-time inventory tracking for SMEs in Surabaya, disaster alerts that keep supply chains moving during floods, seamless payments that keep small exporters competitive. A prolonged outage doesn’t just frustrate customers — it halts orders, delays payroll and erodes the thin margins many businesses already operate on. The same is true across the region. Every extra day of downtime translates into real financial pain for companies trying to grow in an increasingly digital marketplace.

The True Cost of Downtime

Business leaders know the numbers are sobering. Even a short cable cut can disrupt e-commerce platforms, halt cross-border payments and force companies to switch to expensive satellite backups or manual processes. Logistics firms face delayed shipments and higher insurance premiums. Manufacturers miss just-in-time deliveries. In an era when customers expect same-day or next-day service, these disruptions don’t just cost money — they cost market share.

Yet ASEAN still treats submarine cable repair as a largely national issue rather than a shared business imperative. The guidelines remain non-binding. There is no regional fund to cover emergency repairs, no standardised fast-track process, and no collective insurance mechanism to cushion affected economies. Businesses are left to absorb the risk while waiting for individual governments to act.

Turning Vulnerability into a Strategic Advantage

This doesn’t have to be the case. A stronger regional framework — with binding timelines, harmonised permitting and shared resources — would deliver immediate business benefits: faster recovery, lower insurance costs, greater investor confidence and more predictable supply chains. It would also encourage more private investment in redundant cables and new landing stations, creating opportunities for local contractors, technology providers and skilled workers.

The recent Concept Paper on Critical Underwater Infrastructure Security shows ASEAN is thinking about this issue more seriously. But the conversation must move beyond defence and security angles to focus squarely on what businesses actually need: speed, certainty and cost efficiency when cables fail.

What ASEAN Must Do Now

For the region’s digital economy to thrive, ministers and policymakers should prioritise:

• Binding repair timelines with clear accountability across member states

• A regional rapid-response fund to cover emergency costs and minimise downtime

• Standardised, low-cost permitting processes with single points of contact

• Joint investment in redundant cable routes and modern monitoring systems

Businesses across ASEAN are ready to grow. They are investing in e-commerce platforms, expanding logistics networks and building digital supply chains. What they need from ASEAN is not more aspirational guidelines, but practical, enforceable support that treats submarine cables as the critical business infrastructure they truly are.

The cables beneath our seas carry far more than data — they carry our livelihoods, our growth ambitions and our shared future. It’s time we protected them like the strategic assets they have become. The guidelines were a start. Now we need action that matches the scale of our digital ambitions.