Baie du Tombeau on the northwest coast of Mauritius - a place where only one submarine cable comes ashore. This does not mean that the island relies on just one line: the country has four coastal stations and five cables. Simply, each station is responsible for its own direction, and this one is for the northern path.
The cable is called Meltingpot Indianoceanic Submarine System (METISS), it has been operational since 2021 and connects four points: Mauritius itself, Fort-Douglas on Madagascar, Le Port on Réunion, and Umbogintwini in South Africa. So this is a southern route - to the African coast, not Europe or Asia.
The other directions of the island lead from other stations. In Baie-Jacot, MARS, SAFE, and T3 arrive; in Terre-Rouge, LION arrives, and MARS additionally connects the main island with Rodrigues. Such a distribution gives Mauritius redundancy: the directions are physically spread along the coast and geographically.
What the Measurements Show
Our distributed measurement network constantly checks the availability of Bé-dú-Tombo: there are 186 checks in the archive, with an average round-trip delay of 164 milliseconds. For the Indian Ocean, this is a normal value, and it itself explains the geography: the signal travels thousands of kilometers through glass to the continent and back. In a European city, the nearest neighbor usually takes 20-30 milliseconds.
The flat latency at this station indicates that the southern path is working normally. If METISS were to go down for maintenance, traffic from Mauritius would not disappear - it would be rerouted to northern and eastern lines, but the routes would become longer, and the response time higher.
Mauritius in the Resilience Index
In our Resilience Index, Mauritius scores 68 out of 100 and falls into the "moderate resilience" class. For an island, this is a good result: it is not about the number of cables themselves, but that they come in at different points along the coast and go off in different directions - towards Africa, neighboring islands, and further towards Asia.
Comparison helps to feel the difference. Next to Mayotte, there are three cables, but only one leads to the mainland, and its index is 40 points. Madagascar has 75. It’s not the length of the list that matters, but the number of truly independent paths.
To see how routes behave to Mauritius right now, you can check the live map. If you’re interested in your own connection, there’s a page called “Is my connection affected”.
Built GeoCables to monitor submarine cables in real time. Runs his own distributed network of measurement servers, including in regions poorly covered by public internet measurements.
