VPN server in Indonesia: the Jakarta exit server

The tunnel ends in Jakarta, in the same country as services hosted in Indonesia.

That position, and the Indonesian address itself, account for most of the reasons to choose this exit.

Latency has a floor that distance sets. A signal in fibre travels about 200 km each millisecond and has to go there and back, so the one-way distance in kilometres, divided by 100, gives the shortest possible round trip in milliseconds.

Cables between islands have to cross the sea, and every cable takes a longer path than the great-circle line, so a measured figure always sits above the floor.

On Java the exit is close. Bandung is 120 km from Jakarta, a floor of 1.2 ms, and Surabaya in East Java is 660 km away (6.6 ms).

Beyond Java the figures grow. Denpasar in Bali is 960 km from Jakarta (9.6 ms), Balikpapan in Kalimantan 1,250 km (12.4 ms), and Makassar in Sulawesi and Medan in northern Sumatra about 1,400 km each (about 14 ms).

The far east of the country is in a different category. Jayapura, in Papua, is 3,800 km from Jakarta, a floor of 37.8 ms, which is further than Jakarta is from Manila (2,800 km) or Hong Kong (3,250 km).

Jakarta is not the closest exit on the map for every Indonesian city. The comparisons below show where the great circle favours Singapore or Sydney, and how much that advantage counts.

Medan, in northern Sumatra, is 620 km from Singapore and 1,400 km from Jakarta, so Singapore has the lower floor (6.2 against 14.2 ms). The advantage holds for destinations in Singapore. For a service hosted in Jakarta it reverses: through Singapore, the traffic covers at least 620 km plus the 910 km from Singapore to Jakarta, about 1,530 km, against 1,400 km through the Jakarta exit.

Jayapura, in Papua, is a close call. It is 3,650 km from Sydney and 3,800 km from Jakarta, about 1 ms apart in the floor (36.5 against 37.8 ms), with Tokyo further at 4,250 km. A margin of 150 km says little about real routes, which depend on where Papua's cables run, so the server list is the better guide. For Indonesian services, Jakarta also has the advantage of an Indonesian address.

Bali and Sulawesi stay with Jakarta. Denpasar is 960 km from Jakarta, 1,700 km from Singapore and 4,600 km from Sydney, and Makassar is 1,400 km from Jakarta against 1,900 km from Singapore.

The Singapore page covers the same choice from Singapore's side.

For Indonesians abroad, the floor to Jakarta depends on where they are. From Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, it is about 9 to 12 ms. From Bangkok (2,350 km), Manila (2,800 km) or Hong Kong (3,250 km), it rises to between 23 and 33 ms.

Australia's west and north are nearer to Jakarta than its east. Darwin is 2,700 km away (27.2 ms) and Perth 3,000 km (30.1 ms), while Sydney is 5,500 km (55.0 ms). Tokyo, at 5,800 km (57.8 ms), is slightly further than Sydney.

For a service hosted in Indonesia, that distance has to be covered anyway, so the Jakarta exit adds little to it. For a service near you, it becomes a detour to Jakarta and back, which is of little consequence for messages and forms and shows in calls and remote desktops. Use Jakarta when a service needs to see an Indonesian address, and a server location near you otherwise.

Through Jakarta, websites that localise by address show pages in Indonesian, prices in rupiah and search results that rank Indonesian pages higher.

Indonesian sites usually write rupiah amounts with a full stop between thousands, so Rp 150.000 is one hundred and fifty thousand rupiah, not a decimal figure.

Indonesia spans three time zones. Jakarta is on Western Indonesia Time (UTC+7); Bali, Sulawesi and parts of Kalimantan are on Central Indonesia Time (UTC+8); Maluku and Papua are on Eastern Indonesia Time (UTC+9). A site that infers the time zone from your address, rather than reading it from your device, will usually assume Jakarta's, which is an hour behind Bali and two hours behind Papua.

Downloads follow the address as well. Software mirrors and content delivery networks tend to serve a request from a copy near the address that asks, which through Jakarta usually means a copy in Indonesia or elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

The connection does not change the country of an App Store or Google Play account, which the account itself determines.

In a Bali villa or guesthouse, the Wi-Fi is commonly administered by the owner or a management company, with a password that every guest receives. Whoever administers it can see which devices join and, for any traffic outside a tunnel, which hosts they contact. The rental Wi-Fi page covers this arrangement in detail.

Cafés and co-working spaces carry many laptops on one network for hours at a time. With the tunnel running, your internet traffic crosses that network encrypted and addressed to Jakarta, so others on it cannot see which sites you use.

Bali is about 10 ms of floor from the Jakarta exit, so the tunnel adds little to everyday work there. A stay of several weeks suits the monthly plan at $3.99, which renews until you cancel it in the App Store or Google Play; after cancelling, access continues until the end of the month already paid for.

Follow one request from a laptop on villa Wi-Fi. On the villa's network it is an encrypted packet addressed to the Jakarta exit server; the router's administrator can see its size and timing, but not its contents or the site it is for.

In Jakarta the packet leaves the tunnel. The exit server decrypts it and sends the request on from its own Indonesian address, so it necessarily knows the address of the site. If the connection uses HTTPS, as most websites and apps now do, the exit server cannot read the page or the form inside it. A connection without encryption could be read there.

The site sees the exit's IPv4 address, which every user of the Jakarta exit shares, so the address alone does not distinguish you from the others.

WrapVPN records each connection and disconnection with the account, the time, the exit server and the length of the session. The Jakarta exit server, like every exit, also sends an hourly summary for each tunnel address: the amount of data transferred, the external addresses reached over TCP and the domain names associated with them. That summary can be linked to the account, and the privacy policy describes the rest of what is kept.