Mauritius Telecom has landed the T3 subsea fiber cable in Mauritius.

The Mauritius-to-South Africa cable landed at a cable landing station in Baie Jacotet last week in the Bel Ombre area of the Indian Ocean island.

“Mauritius Telecom brings its 3rd submarine cable to Mauritius, T3! This 24 March, the first end of the cable was connected to its landing station in the south of Mauritius,” the company said on LinkedIn.

The 3,200km T3, in partnership with Liquid Telecom, is set to also land at the Amanzimtoti cable landing station in South Africa. The translated press release says the cable will have 18Tbps, while Submarine Networks suggests T3 will have four fiber pairs and a total planned capacity of 54 Tbps. ASN is the contracted supplier and layer for the cable, with the cable ship CS Teliri landing the cable in Mauritius; the cable is set to go live before the end of 2023.

“With the rapid adoption of applications and services such as cloud computing, connected objects, video streaming, and others, it was essential for Mauritius Telecom to put in place the required infrastructure and capacity,” said Mauritius Telecom CEO Kapil Resaul.

T3 is a partial revival of the IOX submarine cable project that was set to connect Mauritius with South Africa and India. First announced in 2017, it was dropped in 2019.

The SAFE cable linking South Africa with India and Malaysia via Mauritius and Reunion Island landed in Baie Jacotet in 2002, while the Mauritius and Rodrigues Submarine Cable System (MARS) landed in the area in 2019.

The Lower Indian Ocean Network (LION) and Meltingpot Indianoceanic Submarine System (METISS) also connect the island to Madagascar and South Africa respectively, landing further north.

SAFE and LION are operated by Mauritius Telecom. The telco said it is invested in the T3 cable to “diversify its digital roads and secure its access to information highways.”

Though it can trace its roots back to the original state-owned telegraph entity on the island, Mauritius Telecom was incorporated in 1988 as Mauritius Telecommunication Services and merged with Overseas Telecommunications Services (previously Cable & Wireless) in 1992. What was then France Telecom (and now Orange) took a 40 percent stake in the company in 2000, with the government retaining more than 30 percent and local bank SBM owning around 19 percent.