The Mediterranean has long been an epicentre for transiting huge amounts of international traffic via subsea cables, connecting up different countries between regions. That importance has only grown, but its role has transformed: today, it is evolving into a vital high-density digital superhighway.
As an increasing number of subsea systems have sprung up, the question for players in the sector is how they can add resilience and diversity in a truly connected, rich and more carrier-neutral ecosystem characterised by the rapidly growing involvement of hyperscalers and content providers.
“The Mediterranean subsea sector is going through a very interesting phase,” says Giuseppe Valentino, executive vice president of marketing and product management for backbone and infrastructure solutions at Sparkle. “We’re seeing many investments in the region from international operators, hyperscalers and infrastructure players, creating new routes, landing points and a digital ecosystem.”
Underlining the continued essential role that the region continues to play, Valentino points to Europe having four of the 10 most connected cities in TeleGeography’s latest connectivity rankings from August – London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Paris.
Mixing blue and green
To retain the Mediterranean’s position going forward, industry players are realigning their goals to meet new realities. “The market is becoming more conscious of resilience,” says Valentino. “It is no longer sufficient to have a lot of capacity if that capacity is concentrated along the same geographical paths.”
Sparkle itself is reflecting these beliefs in action, after starting this year with a bang when the company unveiled GreenMed, a new subsea cable to be built in the Adriatic Sea to the east of Italy. This will complement its flagship BlueMed system that went live three years ago, in September 2023, covering the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west of the country.
The first segments of GreenMed, which Sparkle is building with Alcatel Submarine Networks and Orange subsidiary Elettra, an Italian marine installation company, are expected to enter service by late 2028. It will be fully integrated into the carrier’s broader backbone and support growing demand for cloud, content and AI-based services, as well as enterprise digitalisation.
The system will also operate under an open-cable model, whereby fibre tenants will be free to select their preferred optical architecture and vendor.
On top of that, Sparkle has struck a deal with NaiTel, the telecoms arm of Jordan’s Aqaba Digital Hub, to integrate GreenMed with terrestrial fibre networks and regional interconnection platforms in Jordan.
Digital corridors
Highlighting the need to boost digital corridors, Valentino emphasises that GreenMed will very much not be a standalone network, but a system that enriches overall connectivity in the Mediterranean.
“BlueMed, GreenMed and other assets like our Genoa landing platform are not separate pieces of infrastructure,” says Valentino. “They are complementary elements of a broader connectivity strategy. We’re moving from a capacity-driven model to an end-to-end connectivity model.”
He adds: “Customers increasingly want to know not only how much capacity they can buy, but which exact route that capacity is taking. They want more routes, more landing options, more geographical diversity, and open and easy interconnection.”
He adds that GreenMed is set to further boost the diversification that BlueMed led before it by providing fibre connectivity between the Levant countries along the sea’s eastern edge, the Balkans and Italy via the strategic gateways of Crete and Sicily. Both cables also have an aggregation point in Milan, growing all the time as a key gravitational hub in southern Europe.
Furthermore, Sparkle has a landing platform in Genoa, which is blossoming as an alternative gateway into Europe. As well as hosting BlueMed and the Blue-Raman cable built in partnership with Google and other operators, the company has signed agreements to land other systems such as Unitirreno and Barracuda, with the capability to host more.
Deep heritage
But Sparkle’s heritage in the Mediterranean goes far deeper. The company owns the MedNautilus subsea cable and has participated in multiple consortia over time.
This included last year unveiling a collaboration with other carriers on the AAE-2 cable between Europe, Africa and Asia, connecting Italy to Hong Kong and Singapore via Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula and Thailand.
“Over the years, we’ve developed a combination of submarine systems, terrestrial backbones, IP networks and international points of presence,” says Valentino. “Projects like AAE-2 also target further development of an interregional corridor to strengthen our network capabilities to India and Southeast Asia, and renovate legacy consortium cable assets like SEA-ME-WE 4, SEA-ME-WE 5 and IMEWE.”
In all, Sparkle owns and manages a network of more than 600,000km of fibre worldwide, with proprietary terrestrial and subsea backbones in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Americas, as well as ownership in submarine cables connecting Europe with Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, the company’s global IP transit backbone, Seabone, has just reached a milestone, hitting its 30th birthday. Today, the network is available in 126 points of presence and telehouses worldwide, with Sparkle embracing multiple technology changes, platforms and additional capabilities such as DDoS protection services as it has evolved over time.
“For me, the most important achievement of Seabone is not related to a specific technology or asset,” says Valentino. “It’s the fact that the network has continuously evolved and expanded, being adapted to where the digital world was going.”
Elaborating further, he says: “When Seabone started in 1996, we were talking about just 45Mbps links between Milan, Palermo, Miami and Montreal. Today, we’re talking about a global tier-one IP transit backbone providing high-speed access to the global internet for ISPs, hyperscalers, content providers and enterprises worldwide.”
Next-level innovation
That evolution by both Sparkle and other carriers continues now, with new projects and collaborations that promise to move networks well beyond their initial goals.
A prime example is the EU-funded ECSTATIC project, which Sparkle joined last year. The initiative is geared towards the development of innovations that harness the network as a real-time sensor to improve seismic monitoring and infrastructure protection, aided by advances in technologies like AI and data processing.
This is just one sensing project Sparkle has been working on, trialling network innovations in the hope of unlocking major new avenues of potential in the future. As part of this, the plan is to install the technology in Italian waters.
“Traditionally, a submarine cable’s job is to carry traffic, but ECSTATIC could have applications in early warning of earthquakes and tsunamis, as well as in infrastructure monitoring and predictive maintenance,” says Valentino. “We’re beginning to think of fibre not only as a data highway, but also as infrastructure capable of observing its environment.”
Training the future
Of course, as the industry rapidly evolves, the next generation of employees needs extra skills to develop networks geared towards state-of-the-art capabilities.
That is why Sparkle is supporting new training initiatives, having recently launched what it describes as the world’s first postgraduate programme dedicated to submarine cables along with the University of Genoa and philanthropic organisation the SubOptic Foundation.
“The subsea industry has become much more multidisciplinary,” says Valentino. “You need expertise in network architecture, marine operations, permitting, environmental aspects, cybersecurity, regulation, economics and, increasingly, geopolitics. We need people who understand how all the pieces of the ecosystem fit together.”
Given its development as an increasingly important subsea and digital hub, Genoa is an ideal location for the programme. Yet Valentino is keen to re-emphasise that today’s market revolves around building a denser, more resilient ecosystem that makes greater use of automation, AI, real-time data and self-monitoring capabilities, rather than a single network in one location.
He believes the Mediterranean will be one of the key showcases for this reality coming together, driven by its forward-looking stance and already-dense subsea and terrestrial infrastructure.
“The region has enormous traffic growth potential and is strategically critical from a resilience and geopolitical perspective,” says Valentino. “I think it will be one of the places where the transformation is most visible.”
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