IOX Cable to build new Indian Ocean cable

IOX Cable Ltd and Nokia’s Alcatel Submarine Networks last week announced plans to build the IOX Cable System in the Indian Ocean.

The new submarine cable will connect the eastern coast of South Africa with the eastern coast of India, hooking up the islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues along the way.

It will span 8,850km and offer a planned total design capacity of 13Tbps per fiber pair via ASN’s 1620 SOFTNODE and ROADM gear.

IOX is based in Mauritius, and clearly local access for the island and its neighbor to the east is a key driver for the plans. Rodrigues is new to me, and is apparently a part of the Republic of Mauritius as well. Its 42 square miles are home to just 42,000 or so people.

But they also clearly hope to cut latency between South Africa and India, and thus bring in some traffic that otherwise would have to hug the coastline past the Middle East and East Africa.