Submarine Cable Linking Reunion to South Africa Targets 2028 Launch

Telco OI, Free’s Indian Ocean subsidiary, has committed capital to a 93 million euro submarine cable project that will connect Reunion Island directly to South Africa by 2028, giving the territory a new international data gateway and replacing infrastructure that has been in service since 2002.

The project, called ReuNION, is steered by La Reunion Connectee, with Telco OI joining as a consortium member. The cable carries 16 pairs of optical fibers and is designed to serve as the island’s primary international data route for the decade ahead.

Additional reference context is available at https://dcmag.fr/free-investit-dans-lavenir-numerique-de-la-reunion-avec-le-projet-de-cable-sous-marin-reunion/.

The operational case is straightforward. Reunion’s fixed and mobile data traffic reached an estimated 2.6 terabits per second in 2025 and is projected to reach 6.4 terabits per second by 2030. The SAFE cable, which has handled the island’s international traffic for more than two decades, is approaching end-of-life. Without new capacity in place before demand peaks, the island’s telecommunications infrastructure faces a structural bottleneck that no amount of domestic network investment can resolve.

ReuNION addresses that bottleneck directly. Free will receive a dedicated fiber pair from the cable, securing the bandwidth it needs to sustain its subscriber base through the projected growth period. The company has operated in Reunion since 2017 and has invested more than 125 million euros in the island’s telecom infrastructure over the past decade, covering network buildout and service expansion. Its most recent addition, in June 2026, extended roaming coverage in Mauritius to all 5G subscribers at no extra charge.

By contrast, the submarine cable investment moves Free’s role from network operator to backbone stakeholder. Rather than purchasing capacity from third-party systems, the company is building into the physical infrastructure that will carry international traffic for the island through the 2030s. That shift has strategic weight: a dedicated fiber pair is not a leased service that can be renegotiated or interrupted. It is owned capacity.

The consortium structure reflects the scale of the undertaking. Telco OI is itself a joint venture between the Iliad Group, Free’s parent company, and the Axian group. La Reunion Connectee provides overall project direction. The 93 million euro project has a service launch scheduled for 2028.

That timeline gives Reunion roughly three years to prepare the transition from SAFE to ReuNION and to integrate the new capacity into existing network architecture. The SAFE cable’s retirement will not be an abrupt cutover; the overlap period allows operators to migrate traffic gradually and test redundancy before the old system is decommissioned.

The cable’s direct South Africa routing matters beyond raw capacity. It creates a new geographic path for traffic destined to mainland Africa and beyond, diversifying the island’s international connectivity away from a single aging route. A single cable carrying decades of accumulated traffic represents a single point of failure for an island economy. ReuNION distributes that risk and adds substantial headroom above projected 2030 demand levels.

The ReuNION project is one of several submarine infrastructure initiatives active in the Indian Ocean region. Whether the 2028 service launch holds to schedule, and how smoothly the transition from SAFE is managed in practice, will determine whether the capacity arrives before demand outpaces what the existing system can carry.