Indosat and Arsari launched RAIA Grid on 26 August with a footprint Indosat already owned

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PT Infra Fiber Teknologi launched an open-access fibre platform called RAIA Grid in Jakarta on 26 August, claiming 86,000 kilometres of network serving telcos, data centres, cloud providers and hyperscalers, and declining to say how much of the 86,000 kilometres is lit, where it runs, what it costs to buy capacity on it, or who has bought any (which is a lot of things to leave out of a launch, and which regional coverage duly noted).

The obvious read is that the number is doing work it has not earned. That read is wrong, and the way it is wrong is the interesting part.

The 86,000 kilometres is real, and most of it has been carrying traffic for years, because it is built out of Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison’s own fibre. On 23 December 2025 Indosat signed an investment agreement worth Rp14.6 trillion, about US$870 million, to transfer those assets into a new vehicle in which it would retain roughly 45 percent, with about 45 percent held jointly by Arsari Group and Singapore’s Northstar Group and a thin free float on top.

The Jakarta Post published the split. It also published the geography, which is the part telco people actually want: roughly 45 percent of the network on Java, 55 percent off it.

The launch disclosed nothing because the disclosures had already happened, in December, to an audience of equity analysts.

The launch disclosed nothing because the disclosures had already happened, in December, to an audience of equity analysts.

So what happened on 26 August was a brand.

There is nothing scandalous about that (companies rename balance-sheet restructurings all the time, and “RAIA Grid” is a better name than “FiberCo”), but it does mean the question worth asking has moved. The question is no longer whether the fibre exists. It is what changed about who Indonesian carriers are buying it from.

Here is the polite version, which is roughly how the participants would put it.

Indosat gets to be asset-light, converting a depreciating capital base into a stake in a wholesale platform that can sell to everybody, which is a genuinely better business than owning fibre you only sell to yourself. Indonesia gets a carrier-neutral layer it has been short of. Arsari and Northstar get an infrastructure position in the country’s AI build-out at what is presumably a sensible entry price.

Here is the less polite version, which is also true.

Arsari Group was founded in 2006 by Hashim Djojohadikusumo, who bankrolled Prabowo Subianto’s presidential campaigns from 2009, sat as deputy head of Gerindra’s advisory council, and is the President’s younger brother. His son Aryo, Arsari’s deputy chief executive, spoke at the launch alongside Indosat’s Vikram Sinha.

An asset-light restructuring is also, viewed from a slightly different chair, an introduction.

An asset-light restructuring is also, viewed from a slightly different chair, an introduction: the national fibre layer that Telkom’s and XLSmart’s traffic will increasingly ride now has the President’s brother holding half of it with a Singapore private equity firm, on terms that were disclosed once, in December, in rupiah.

And yet.

Indonesia needs this. The country’s route diversity is poor, its data-centre demand is climbing faster than its backbone, and open-access wholesale is the structure that has worked everywhere it has been tried properly. A carrier-neutral platform with real interconnection would lower prices for everyone selling into Indonesia, including the Singapore operators who currently price Indonesian connectivity as a rounding error plus a risk premium.

Whether it does that depends entirely on things nobody announced: the reference offer, the interconnect terms, whether Indosat’s own traffic gets the same rate card as XLSmart’s, and who arbitrates when it does not. Those documents exist or they will. They will not be launched.

The map is the disclosure that matters, and it remains the one thing in this story that has never been published.¹

In fairness to RAIA Grid, no fibre wholesaler on earth publishes its route map, for reasons that are half security and half commercial. The convention is that you show it to the customer under NDA. The convention is also why “86,000 km” survives as a number for years without anyone checking it. ↩

Footnotes