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Cable connecting SA, Mauritius, Reunion, Madagascar goes live

By , ITWeb
Africa , Mauritius , 15 Apr 2021
Kresh Goomany, CEO of Emtel.
Kresh Goomany, CEO of Emtel.

A 3 200km submarine cable that connects SA with Mauritius, Reunion Island and Madagascar has gone live.

In a statement today, Emtel, a telecom network operator in Mauritius, says it has provided the only landing point for the Meltingpot Indianoceanic Submarine System (METISS) fibre optic cable in the country.

The 3 200km cable connects Reunion Island, Madagascar and SA to Emtel’s ANSI/TIA tier 3 certified data centre in Arsenal, near Port-Louis, Mauritius.

“METISS is already connected to many global public cloud services, application providers and African exchanges with fully redundant backhaul in Mauritius and South Africa,” says Kresh Goomany, CEO of Emtel.

“It provides global telecoms organisations, multinationals and enterprises with interests in connected regions, with the reliable services and capacities they need for telecommunications that empower digital enterprises. The whole offer comes with a world-class quality of service at very affordable prices.”

The company says the METISS submarine cable offers high-capacity throughput and further connectivity to many African countries via Emtel and its partners.

It enables organisations to benefit from colocation, private links, enterprise-grade Internet connectivity, with remote peering to content and cloud providers and peering agreements, it adds.

According to Emtel, Mauritius is ideally situated to provide regional telecoms solutions to carriers, enterprises and corporates with its political stability and reliable electrical grid supply.

The company says METISS connects Mauritius with Africa and the world via Emtel’s own points of presence (PoPs) in Johannesburg and Durban.

“It provides new low latency routes for over-the-top service providers. Latencies are just 35ms from Arsenal to Durban, along South Africa’s east coast, and just 45ms to Johannesburg, which is in South Africa’s interior,” says Emtel.

“The South Africa PoPs augment PoPs that are already in Mombasa, London, Paris and Singapore. Thanks to its partnerships, Emtel enables its customers to connect to around 160 PoPs worldwide,” it adds.

Emtel also points out that METISS interconnects with large data centres in SA that act as a hub to the rest of the world and host global cloud service providers, such as AWS and Azure.

“With the interconnectivity, peering and exchange benefits it provides, METISS gives Mauritians faster and more reliable access to digital resources and provides a platform to develop the country’s next-generation services and applications,” says Goomany.

* Article first published on www.itweb.co.za

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