New submarine cable connecting Durban and Mauritius goes live

Kresh Goomany

A submarine telecommunications system connecting South Africa to the islands of Madagascar, Reunion and Mauritius has gone live and is carrying Internet traffic between the countries.

The Metiss cable — it’s short for “MEltingpoT Indianoceanic Submarine System” — runs for about 3 200km along the seabed between Mauritius and Durban, where it terminates at a Liquid Intelligent Technologies facility in Amanzimtoti, just south of KwaZulu-Natal’s largest city, Durban. The cable has a design capacity of 24Tbit/s.

The Metiss fibre cable went live after Emtel, a telecoms operator in Mauritius, provided the only landing point for the system on the island, at Arsenal, near the capital, Port Louis.

Metiss is already connected to many global public cloud services, application providers and African exchanges…

“Metiss is already connected to many global public cloud services, application providers and African exchanges with fully redundant backhaul in Mauritius and South Africa,” said Emtel CEO Kresh Goomany in a statement on Wednesday.

Goomany said Metiss connects Mauritius with mainland Africa and onward to the rest of the world via Emtel’s points of presence in Johannesburg and Durban. “It provides new, low-latency routes for over-the-top service providers,” he said, referring to companies such as Netflix and Facebook. “Latencies are just 35ms from Arsenal to Durban and just 45ms to Johannesburg.”

Greater throughput

He said that the system gives Mauritians “faster and more reliable access to digital resources and provides a platform to develop the country’s next-generation services and applications”.

Metiss offers much greater throughput in relation to the other older cables with lower capacities that Mauritians previously relied on, he added. “It paves the way for a new generation of applications and services to be delivered to end users via technologies such as 5G.”

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