Sparkle, the first international service provider in Italy and among the top global operators, announced this morning the landing of the BlueMed submarine cable in Chania (Greece) during a press conference hosted at the Residence of the Ambassador of Italy in Athens and attended by Paolo Cuculi, Ambassador of Italy, Dimitris Papastergiou, Minister of Digital Governance, Alessandro Pansa, Chairman of Sparkle, Enrico Bagnasco, CEO of Sparkle, Daniele Mancuso, CEO of Sparkle Greece, Nikos Konstantinidis, Head of Open Hub at Sparkle and moderated by Stella Tsitsoula, Communication Consultant for ICT and CEO of RED.comm.
BlueMed is Sparkle’s new cable connecting Italy with France, Greece and several countries bordering the Mediterranean. It is part of the Blue & Raman Submarine Cable Systems built in partnership with Google and other operators that stretch further in the Middle East up to Mumbai, India.
With four fibre pairs and an initial design capacity of more than 25 Terabits per second (Tbps) per pair, BlueMed offers high-speed Internet connections and high-performance solutions to Internet Service Providers (ISPs), carriers, telecom operators, content providers, enterprises, and institutions to support the growing needs and digital evolution of the connected countries.
Laying began in 2023 with the main Tyrrhenian trunk from Genoa to Palermo and with branches to Marseille and Bastia (France), Golfo Aranci (Sardinia), Pomezia (Rome). From Palermo, the cable crossed the Strait of Messina to reach the Greek island of Crete from where it will continue with further branches in the Mediterranean up to Aqaba in Jordan. The Tyrrhenian and the Middle Eastern terrestrial sections are in full operation, while further Mediterranean landings and the full operation from Genoa to Aqaba are expected by this year.
In Crete, BlueMed reaches Sparkle’s data centre in Chania, a cable landing station interconnected with the island’s terrestrial networks and Sparkle’s MedNautilus network (with connections to mainland Greece, Turkey, and Italy). Sparkle is further developing the hub to accommodate other submarine cable projects including GreenMed that will cross the Adriatic Sea connecting Italy to Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece and Turkey, thus creating a diversified, low latency route between Central Europe, the Balkans and the Central and Eastern Mediterranean countries.