MÉTISS is a 3,200 km subsea fibre optic cable system that connects South Africa to the Indian Ocean islands of Madagascar, Reunion and Mauritius – it lands in Amanzimtoti and is backhauled by Liquid Telecoms to Teraco’s data centre in Durban.
With MÉTISS consortium members having the infrastructure in both the Teraco Durban (DB1) and Johannesburg (JB1)data centre facilities, the Indian Ocean Islands have direct access to Teraco’s ecosystem of over 300 networks, 130 IT service providers, 50 global content providers, and the key global cloud providers says Michele McCann, Head of Interconnection and Peering at Teraco.
The availability of a new cable servicing the Indian Ocean Islands region widens the addressable market for content and cloud providers in South Africa. It adds new resilience to the existing telecommunications infrastructure.
MÉTISS is expected to provide global telecoms organisations, multinationals and enterprises with interests in the region with the reliable services and capacities to empower their digital strategies.
“The cable brings connectivity across regions that were previously hard to reach. Through Teraco, access to this cable is an interconnect away and in keeping with our tagline, ‘the world connects here’, we are very proud to play such a pivotal role in the success of this cable system,” says McCann.
Peering at Africa’s largest Internet exchange, NAPAfrica is now also possible for the island region and brings many benefits: reduced latency; network fault tolerance; reliable exchange of traffic; increased routing control; and improved network performance.
Interconnection and peering successfully addresses a growing need for more bandwidth but at the lowest possible latency. This also needs to be done cost-effectively. The MÉTISS cable system will enable further interconnection within the Indian Ocean Islands region and the growth of its digital economy. Teraco makes it easy and accessible for everyone to connect within the data centre and immediately benefit.
