Mauritius, a small developing island nation off the east coast of Madagascar, will be the second African country to host Google Cache Servers.
Already installed and configured, the servers will be put into operation from September.
Kenya was first to host a Google cache server in Africa. But the new move gives a strong signal to the international community about Mauritius’s ability ideal to host Internet content for the African region, given its ICT infrastructure and connectivity.
“The hosting of those cache servers promotes Mauritius as a credible destination for IT-enabled services,” said Suraj Ramgoolam, chairman of Mauritius’ National Computer Board (NCB).
The servers will be located at the Mauritius Internet Exchange Point, operated by the NCB, in the Ebene Cybercity.
“The cache servers will also enable Mauritian users to get quicker access on Mauritian Internet sites. Concerning Google Mail for instance, thanks to the cache servers, the traffic won’t need to go outside of the country. It will save us some international bandwidth,” Ramgoolam said.
Google last week also started offering Mauritian Creole. The world’s biggest search engine has enrolled the services of Arnaud Carpooran, a linguist at the University of Mauritius, to do the translation work. Carpooran and his team have been working on the project for the last few months. Henceforth, “I feel lucky” can also be seen as “mo ena lasans” on google.mu.