10 Gbps in Paradise: Inside Seychelles’ High-Speed Internet Revolution (and the Satellite Showdown)
Seychelles may be a remote Indian Ocean archipelago, but it boasts surprisingly advanced internet infrastructure. The country’s connectivity journey leapt forward with the installation of submarine fiber-optic cables. The first major undersea cable, the Seychelles East Africa System, connected the islands to continental Africa in the early 2010s, ending reliance on slow, costly satellites. In August 2021, a second submarine link was secured when Intelvision obtained support to lease a branch of the massive 2Africa submarine cable being built by Vodafone Ifc Developingtelecoms. This new cable, offering 600 Gbps of international capacity, complements SEAS to boost redundancy and lower bandwidth costs Developingtelecoms. With these cables as a backbone, Seychelles has greatly expanded its domestic fiber network across the main islands. On land, fiber-optic broadband has become the standard. Cable & Wireless Seychelles – the oldest telecom operator – began a nationwide Fibre-to-the-Home rollout in 2017, aiming to replace all copper lines with fiber by 2020 Nation Nation. Today, fiber connectivity reaches homes and businesses on Mahé and the populated inner islands like Praslin and La Digue. In fact, by late 2024 CWS launched “GigaNet” service as Africa’s first 10 Gbps broadband offering, using cutting-edge 50G-PON technology Lightreading. This milestone put
