Mauritius–Rodrigues Submarine Cable (MARS)

Overview

The Mauritius–Rodrigues Submarine Cable, known by its acronym MARS, is a domestic undersea link operated by Mauritius Telecom that connects the main island of Mauritius to Rodrigues, a small volcanic island sitting roughly 560 kilometres to the east. The cable came into service in March 2019, providing a dedicated high-capacity fibre pathway between the two islands.

Route and Landing Points

MARS lands at La Prairie on Mauritius and at Grand Baie on Rodrigues. The route crosses a stretch of the Indian Ocean that, despite its relative remoteness, carries significant strategic weight: Rodrigues has historically depended on satellite and radio links for communications with the Mauritian mainland, making the cable a substantial upgrade in both capacity and reliability for the island's roughly 40,000 residents.

Capacity and Ownership

The system carries a design capacity of 8 Tbit/s — a figure that substantially exceeds any foreseeable near-term demand from Rodrigues, but reflects standard practice in modern cable design to build headroom for future growth rather than engineer to current load. Mauritius Telecom holds sole ownership of the system, making MARS a rare example of a national telecommunications operator constructing and owning a domestic submarine cable outright, without consortium partners or international carrier involvement.

Significance

For Rodrigues, which falls under the administrative jurisdiction of Mauritius, the cable represents a shift from a communications bottleneck to genuine broadband connectivity. Prior to MARS, the island's international and inter-island traffic was routed through capacity-constrained alternatives that could not support modern data demands. Within the broader Indian Ocean cable landscape, MARS occupies a narrow but important niche: a purely domestic link designed to bind an outlying territory more firmly into the national digital infrastructure of a small island state.