Mauritius Telecom is in talks with operators including Reliance Jio and Orange to build a new subsea cable connecting Africa, Indian Ocean islands and Asia, a move to avoid network downtime experienced last month.
Blomberg reported, Mauritius Telecom CEO per Kapil Reesaul revealed the new cable will be called T4 and possesses 1,000 times more capacity comapred to the South Africa Far East (SAFE) cable it will replace.
“With so many cable breakdowns we are having, we want to secure the far east with a cable that will run from Mauritius to India and Singapore,” said Reesaul.
The move was prompted by a recent outage that affected subscribers on April 26. The downtime lasted five hours, and was the most recent issue after four cables sustained heavy damaged near the Ivory Coast last month – three lines off the coast of Yemen have been offline sice late February.
The T4 cable will stretch across a similar route to the 13,500 kilometre long SAFE, which starts from South Africa, to Madagascar, La Reunion, Mauritius, India and Singapore.
Mauritius Telecom invested US$60 million on the T3 cable to South Africa and the island nation is connected on the northern route by the LION/LION2-EASSy-EIG cable.
