Mauritius Telecom Network Operator Emtel has provided the only landing point for the METISS (Meltingpot Indianoceanic Submarine System) fibre optic cable in the country.
The 3,200 km cable connects Reunion Island, Madagascar and South Africa to Emtel’s ANSI/TIA tier 3 certified data centre in Arsenal, near Port-Louis, the country’s capital.
“METISS is already connected to many global public cloud services, application providers and African exchanges with fully redundant backhaul in Mauritius and South Africa,” said Kresh Goomany, CEO of Emtel. “It provides global telecoms organisations, multinationals and enterprises with interests in connected regions, with the reliable services and capacities they need for telecommunications that empower digital enterprises. The whole offer comes with a world-class quality of service (QoS) at very affordable prices.”
The METISS submarine cable offers high-capacity throughput and further connectivity to many African countries via Emtel and its partners. It enables organisations to benefit from colocation, private links, enterprise-grade Internet connectivity, with remote peering to content and cloud providers and peering agreements.
Mauritius is ideally situated to provide regional telecoms solutions to carriers, enterprises and corporates with its political stability and reliable electrical grid supply. Combined with Emtel’s 24/7 enterprise support, advanced technology implementations, and innovative solutions, these are among the many reasons Emtel’s Data Centre has maintained a 100% uptime and availability record in delivering collocated services for the last nine years.
METISS connects Mauritius with Africa and the world via Emtel’s own points of presence (PoP) in Johannesburg and Durban, in South Africa. It provides new low latency routes for over-the-top (OTT) service providers. Latencies are just 35ms from Arsenal to Durban, along South Africa’s east coast, and just 45ms to Johannesburg, which is in South Africa’s interior. The South Africa PoPs augment PoPs that are already in Mombasa, London, Paris and Singapore. Thanks to its partnerships, Emtel enables its customers to connect to around 160 PoPs worldwide.
METISS interconnects with large data centres in South Africa that act as a hub to the rest of the world and host global cloud service providers, such as AWS and Azure.
“With the interconnectivity, peering and exchange benefits it provides, METISS gives Mauritians faster and more reliable access to digital resources and provides a platform to develop the country’s next-generation services and applications,” says Kresh.
METISS offers much greater throughput in relation to the other older cables with lower capacities that Mauritians previously relied on. It paves the way for a new generation of applications and services to be delivered to end users via technologies such as 5G.
“The METISS consortium, of which Emtel is a member, overcame the difficulties associated with Covid-19 and lockdown to successfully install the cable in all four territories,” said Kresh. “We are proud to make this advanced solution available to our country. Emtel has always aspired to revolutionise digital services for Mauritians, which is why we pioneered services such as Unlimited Internet Data, Calls and SMS to democratise access. METISS is part of our promise to bring Mauritians products that provide more freedom and satisfaction, and in so doing, continue to enhance their lives.”
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