Orange has announced ReuNION, a new subsea cable running from La Réunion to the South African coast. It will carry 16 fibre pairs at about 20Tbit/s each, for a design capacity of roughly 320Tbit/s, and is costed at €93.1-million, about R1.7-billion. Orange Marine will lay it, and Alcatel Submarine Networks will design and manufacture it.

Marine surveys and permit applications come next, with service expected in 2028.

The driver is a retirement, not new demand. The Safe cable entered service in April 2002 and runs 13,500km from Melkbosstrand and Mtunzini through Réunion, Mauritius and India to Malaysia. Réunion's operators expect it to reach the end of its life in 2027, which would leave the island with only Metiss, live since 2021 and landing at Amanzimtoti, as a direct long-haul link.

The funding is mostly European public money: € 30 million from the European Regional Development Fund, € 20 million through the Connecting Europe Facility, € 6.5 million from the French state, and € 36.6 million from the three participating operators. Public body La Réunion Connéctée holds most of the fibre pairs for onward sale, alongside Orange, Réunicable and Telco OI.

Orange has not named the South African landing station, though Submarine Networks reports the system is engineered to feed the Durban and Johannesburg metros. A second phase extending east to Singapore has been raised but not costed publicly.

TechCentral reported the project and quoted Jean-Louis Le Roux of Orange International Networks on meeting rising traffic demand and the need for resilience. Orange's own announcement sets out the consortium structure and the funding split. Submarine Networks reports the engineering intent to serve Durban and Johannesburg.

South Africa is not paying for this cable and is not the reason it is being built, but it gains a landing and the capacity that comes with it. That matters because the country is accumulating them faster than at any point in its history.

Google has pencilled the Eastern Cape as the southern anchor of its Umoja route to Australia, Seacom is planning a 25,000km successor to its original system, and both of Meta's 2Africa and Project Waterworth cables touch our coastline. Each landing adds route diversity, and route diversity is what stops a single cut from taking services offline.

It is also the precondition for the compute build-out we have been covering, because the argument for putting GPUs in Centurion and selling compute into Europe rests on exactly this: cheap power, cheap land, and enough undersea capacity to make latency somebody else's problem.

You might also like our piece on the Comsol 5G network and the fibre behind every base station, why the SpaceX Icasa hearings leave satellite stalled, and the SA 5G coverage gap all of this feeds.

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