Toamasina, Madagascar

How the Internet Reaches Toamasina

Toamasina sits on the east coast of Madagascar, facing the Indian Ocean roughly 215 kilometres northeast of the capital Antananarivo. As the country's chief seaport, it occupies a strategically coastal position — and it is precisely this coastal geography that makes it a submarine cable landing point. International internet traffic arrives at Toamasina via an undersea cable that connects the city directly to the Comoros archipelago and the French overseas territory of Mayotte to the northwest.

Toamasina is a single-cable terminus. Only one submarine cable, FLY-LION3, lands here, meaning all of the city's international submarine capacity flows through that one connection. The cable ties Toamasina into a small regional cluster of Indian Ocean island territories rather than providing a direct route to continental Africa or intercontinental systems.

The Cable Serving Toamasina

The FLY-LION3 cable is a 400-kilometre system that entered service in 2019. It connects multiple landing points across Madagascar, the Comoros, and Mayotte. From Toamasina, the cable links to Chindini and Fomboni Moheli in the Comoros, and to Kaweni in Mayotte. Within Madagascar itself, FLY-LION3 also lands at Mahajanga on the northwest coast and at Fort Dauphin in the far south. The cable thus forms an inter-island and inter-coastal route across the western Indian Ocean, knitting together scattered communities rather than bridging continents.

Regional Context

Madagascar as a whole hosts 5 submarine cables across 4 landing points, with an average cable length of 8,701 kilometres — reflecting the island's dependence on long-haul Indian Ocean routes. The first cable to serve the country entered service in 2010. Among Madagascar's landing points, Toamasina is the most lightly served: Mahajanga on the northwest coast lands 3 cables, while Fort Dauphin and Toliara each host 2. Toamasina, despite being the country's largest port city, terminates only a single cable system.

What This Means for Connectivity

With only FLY-LION3 serving Toamasina, all international submarine traffic entering and leaving the city travels through that single cable. Any disruption to FLY-LION3 would cut Toamasina's direct submarine link entirely, leaving the city reliant on terrestrial routing within Madagascar to reach other landing points. The destinations directly reachable via this cable are regional in scope — the Comoros and Mayotte — rather than intercontinental, which means onward connectivity to the wider internet depends on how those intermediate nodes connect to larger systems.

Toamasina's position illustrates a broader pattern in Indian Ocean connectivity: a major port city can be economically central to a country while remaining at the thinner edge of its submarine cable network. Understanding which cables land where — and how many — explains why internet resilience can vary sharply between cities within the same country.