Sparkle, the communication infrastructure provider and first international service provider in Italy, announced that it has commenced laying the BlueMed subsea cable in Genoa, Italy. The cable will connect Italy with India, becoming the main data highway between Asia and Europe.
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BlueMed Subsea Cable
BlueMed Subsea cable will establish connections between Italy and France, Greece, and Israel, as well as various branches throughout the Mediterranean. It is part of the Blue & Raman Submarine Cable System project, built in partnership with Google and other operators with further extensions in the African and Asian continents. The cable has four fiber pairs and an initial design capacity of more than 25 Tbps per pair. BlueMed will offer high-speed Internet connections and high-performance connectivity solutions to Internet Service Providers.
Announced in 2019, BlueMed is Sparkle's new subsea cable, and the construction site was inaugurated on July 04, 2022. The deployment began on January 31, 2022, with the laying of the branch in Golfo Aranci, Sardinia, and continued on February 09, 2022, with the landing in Pomezia, on the coast of Rome.
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Genoa Landing Platform features
The Genoa landing platform, which has a multi-conductor submarine pipeline known as the Bore Pipe and reaches through a 6 km network of tunnels to reach the Genoa Lagaccio Open Landing Station, a point of interconnection with other submarine cables and terrestrial national and continental networks. In addition to Blue, the Genoa Landing Platform is designed to safely accommodate up to six new cables without impacting the environment and the city.
The subsea cable will go from Genoa across the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Sicily hub in Palermo, where Sparkle's data center is connected with 18 international cables. From this point, the subsea cable will extend through the Strait of Messina and the Mediterranean Sea down to the Red Sea.
Operational dates of the cable
The first section, Genoa-Golfo Aranci-Pomezia-Palermo, will be operational starting in May 2023, while the extension to Corsica in Bastia will be completed in June 2023.
Mayor of Genoa, Marco Bucci said: "Genoa is even more connected to the world and can play a central role as a hub in the Italian, European, and global scenario. We must and want, as an administration, to be perceived as a facilitator towards companies, we want to make people understand that innovation means efficiency and that it is possible to do things well and quickly for the benefit of citizens and those who want to operate in our territory."
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Other subsea cables in Italy
Several companies are currently laying subsea cables around Italy. For example, a 1,030 km subsea cable connecting Mazara del Vallo in Sicily with Genoa and a branch to Rome was announced by Unitirreno last month. By Q2 of 2025, the system is expected to be operational.
