Reunion Island’s internet traffic is set to more than double within five years, and the undersea cable that has carried the island’s data since 2002 is running out of road. For the residents and the businesses and public services they depend on, that combination poses a real risk to daily connectivity.
The answer, according to a consortium of telecommunications operators, is the ReuNION project: a 93 million euro submarine cable that will run directly from Reunion Island to South Africa. The cable will carry 16 pairs of fiber optic strands, each capable of moving 20 terabits per second. To put that in context, the island’s total traffic measured 2.6 terabits per second in 2025 and is forecast to reach 6.4 terabits per second by 2030. The existing SAFE cable, operational since 2002, cannot absorb that growth and is approaching the end of its working life.
The stakes for ordinary islanders are straightforward. Aging, overloaded infrastructure means slower connections, more outages, and fewer options when something goes wrong. A single cable is a single point of failure.
The ReuNION cable addresses that vulnerability by creating additional international routes for data, reducing the island’s dependence on infrastructure that was never designed for today’s volumes. Free, one of the consortium partners alongside Telco OI, Réunicable, and La Réunion Connectée, will receive a dedicated fiber pair through Telco OI, giving it the capacity to keep pace with its subscribers’ growing demand. Free has operated on the island since 2017 and has invested more than 125 million euros in local infrastructure over that period.
Meanwhile, Orange will take on the work that most directly touches the island itself: securing permits, managing civil engineering, building the landing station, and integrating the new cable with Reunion’s existing terrestrial networks. Orange Marine, the company’s specialist subsidiary, will lay the cable on the ocean floor. Alcatel Submarine Networks has been contracted to design and manufacture it.
Jean-Louis Le Roux, executive vice president of Orange International Networks, described the cable as essential for Reunion’s digital development and for the wider region. The project has attracted European funding through the Connecting Europe Facility program and FEDER, a signal of how seriously policymakers regard the island’s connectivity as a matter of public interest rather than purely commercial calculation.
The cable is scheduled to enter service in 2028. Whether that timeline holds, and whether the capacity it delivers proves sufficient as artificial intelligence, streaming, and remote services continue to drive demand upward, will determine how well Reunion’s residents are served through the 2030s.