It's common to say that small islands "hang by a single cable." But this isn't true for Mayotte: it has three submarine cables, and they all come ashore in two different places. However, when you look at where each one goes, the picture changes.
In Kaweni, two arrive. The Lower Indian Ocean Network 2 (LION2) from 2012 is 2700 kilometers to Nyali on the Kenyan coast, that is, the only cable bringing the island to continental trunk lines. The FLY-LION3 from 2019 looks like a second cable but its length is 400 kilometers and it leads to Moroni on the Comoros.
This makes a connection of three lines, two of which connect neighbors to each other, while one leads to the world. If LION2 goes silent, the remaining two cables will not pick up international traffic: they will lead it to the Comoros, which themselves exit to trunk lines via foreign routes.
What measurements show
Our distributed measurement network constantly checks the availability of CAVENI: in the archive, there are 532 checks, with an average round-trip delay of 138 milliseconds. For an island in the Indian Ocean, this is a typical value determined by distance: it takes time for the signal to travel thousands of kilometers through glass and return. In a European city, the delay to the nearest neighbor is usually between 20-30 milliseconds.
What matters more is that consistent latency holds as long as one direction works. Therefore, any work on the line to Kenya is more noticeable for the island than an outage on any of the inter-island cables.
Mayotte in Comparison with Neighbors
In our resilience index, Mayotte scores 40 out of 100 and falls into the "vulnerable" class. In the region, the picture is as follows: Madagascar - 75, Mauritius - 68, Comoros - 60, Réunion - 42. The difference is not in the number of cables but in the number of truly independent paths: the index counts them specifically.
From a practical standpoint for the island, a new line makes sense not as "another cable," but as a second direction to the backbone networks. Until it exists, three cables on the map remain one road to the world.
To check the status of routes to Mayotte, you can visit the live map, and to see if your own connection is affected, you can go to the page “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.
