• Telecom Italia’s international operation is to build a new subsea route to connect Europe to the Middle East 
• Cable will offer diversity between the Levant countries and Italy
• Network will land on Crete, Sicily and the Balkans 

Telecom Italia’s wholesale division Sparkle has unveiled plans to build a new subsea cable system in the Adriatic Sea, connecting Middle Eastern countries and the Balkans with Italy.

GreenMed East will be built by Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) and installed by Elettra Tlc.

It will offer the shortest route between the Middle East and Europe with the aim of opening a high-performance corridor across the Central-Eastern Mediterranean and strengthening diversification, resilience and low-latency connectivity for carriers, cloud and content players.

GreenMed East will cross the Adriatic Sea, providing diverse optical fibre connectivity between Levant countries and the Milan area, as well as touching points in Crete and Sicily to connect on to Balkan countries. It will link into Sparkle’s existing backbone spanning more than 600,000km of fibre.

The project will build on Sparkle’s existing BlueMed cable system, which runs through the Tyrrhenian Sea, connecting Italy with France, Greece and several other countries bordering the Mediterranean.

“GreenMed represents another concrete step in Sparkle’s strategy to strengthen the Mediterranean basin as a key digital gateway and to reinforce Italy’s role as a primary international connectivity hub,” stated Sparkle’s CEO, Enrico Maria Bagnasco.

“With GreenMed in the Adriatic and BlueMed in the Tyrrhenian, Sparkle offers two highly innovative routes between Europe and the Middle East for maximum diversification and resilience,” he added.

The project was officially signed by the three partners at a ceremony in Dubai this week, and will come into force at the end of February. Under the agreement, ASN will be responsible for system design and the manufacturing of the subsea optical infrastructure, including wet plant components and associated equipment, while Elettra Tlc will carry out marine operations, including route surveys and cable installation/laying activities.

The first segments of the system are expected to be in service by late 2028.

Alain Biston, CEO of ASN, added: “This project will showcase next-generation wet plant technology, scalable capacity design and industrial quality, enabling a future-proof infrastructure that supports the most demanding applications and evolving traffic patterns.”

- James Pearce, Contributing Editor, TelecomTV