Teraco has become an integral node to the Meltingpot Indianoceanic Submarine System (MÉTISS), a 3 200 km subsea fibre optic cable system connecting South Africa to the Indian Ocean islands of Madagascar, Reunion and Mauritius.

The MÉTISS consortium comprises Canal+ Télécom, CEB Fibernet, Emtel, Zeop and SRR (SFR) Telma. The MÉTISS cable lands in Amanzimtoti and is backhauled by Liquid Telecoms to Teraco’s data centre in Durban (DB1).

With MÉTISS consortium members having 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.

This is according to Michele McCann, head of interconnection and peering at Teraco, w says 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.

Situated on Durban’s north coast, Teraco DB1 is a strategic interconnection hub on the African subsea cable map with access to MÉTISS and the cable systems of Seacom and EASSy that are already accessible from the facility.

Teraco’s DB1 facility is connected to the JB1 Campus in Isando, Johannesburg through a wide choice of carriers, via diverse regional fibre routes. It will allow clients to increase the number of partners they connect with and expand their reach into new markets.

Teraco’s DB1 facility offers clients secure colocation and interconnection services, as well as the ability to leverage Teraco’s digital hubs in DB1 and JB1 directly.

“The cable brings connectivity across regions that were previously hard to reach,” says McCann. “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.”

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.