BlueMed makes landfall in Sicily. Sparkle (Tim Group’s global operator) is laying a high-speed internet submarine cable across the Mediterranean Sea. On Tuesday, it successfully connected it to the “Sicily Hub” neutral data centre in Palermo, which is connected to eighteen other international cables.
- BlueMed now stretches from Genoa to Golfo Aranci (Sardinia), Pomezia (near Rome) and Palermo (Sicily) and will be operational starting in late May, allowing high-speed connectivity between these crucial hubs in the Tyrrhenian Sea and readying them to link up with more in the wider Mediterranean area – and beyond.
Hear from the CEO. “With the landing of BlueMed in Palermo, we complete the laying of the Tyrrhenian section of one of the most advanced digital infrastructures in the world while reinforcing Sicily’s centrality in the global internet system,” said Sparkle’s CEO Enrico Bagnasco. “Thanks to BlueMed, the Sicily Hub in Palermo is set for further expansion and growth, confirming itself as a strategic asset for the country’s digitisation and a key hub for data traffic in the Mediterranean region.”
- He said this at a press conference on Thursday in the presence of Roberto Lagalla, Mayor of Palermo, and Ambassador Riccardo Guariglia, Secretary-General of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Think bigger. The BlueMed cable is part of the wider Blue Submarine Cable System project (launched by Sparkle in partnership with Google and other operators) to connect Italy with France, Greece, Israel and several other Mediterranean countries. Blue System is also designed to interlace with other international systems, such as Raman, which will touch Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Oman and India.
- According to Sparkle, the Sicily Hub is the most effective internet exchange point in the Mediterranean due to its proximity to Africa and the Middle East (among the fastest-growing areas of the world in the use of digital communication) and its connection to all the international cables landing in Sicily.
