Strengthening digital connectivity between Europe and North Africa, the ViaTunisia subsea cable segment between Marseille in France, and Bizerte in Tunisia has reached ready-for-service (RFS) status, making the transition from construction to full operational availability on “a direct and resilient” new route between Southern Europe and North Africa.
Co-financed by the European Union under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Digital programme, the ViaTunisia project is designed to provide a high-capacity, secure and diversified connectivity route and digital bridge between the two continents. The Grant Agreement, signed in December 2022, provided funding covering 30% of the construction and management costs.
The cable extends directly into global infrastructure of leading telco Orange in Marseille, enabling “seamless” interconnection with major European datacentres and international networks.
By combining the resilience, security and performance of a global backbone with Marseille’s role as a leading interconnection hub, ViaTunisia will look to provide direct, high-capacity connectivity between North Africa and the wider digital world. It will also multiply route options in this area, especially in natural disaster-prone areas, minimising outages caused by cable failures, thus improving offering a way to enhance overall network resilience.
The ViaTunisia partners said that the journey to RFS began long before the cable touched the seabed. Constructed as an open, point-to-point system with a 25-year design life, ViaTunisia has now transitioned through phases including marine surveys, factory acceptance tests, cable loading, laying, shore landings and final splicing.
Marine operations were carried out by Orange Marine’s Sophie Germain and Elettra TLC’s Teliri cable ships, under the coordination of Elettra TLC, with system design and equipment delivered by Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN).
ViaTunisia extends directly into Orange’s global infrastructure in Marseille through a fully redundant urban fibre ring connecting all of its datacentres in the city. The telco sees the set up as enabling interconnexion and distribution of international capacity across Europe.
The link is part of the wider Medusa Submarine Cable System undersea system, which will look to establish a new direct and resilient route across the Mediterranean, supporting growing demand for data traffic, cloud services, artificial intelligence (AI) applications and digital transformation initiatives across the region.
Owned by African infrastructure and telecoms operator AFR-IX Telecom, Medusa is 8,760km long, and will be the first and longest subsea cable to connect the main Mediterranean countries, providing access to telecommunications infrastructure and 16 landing points around the Mediterranean Sea.
The cable will have segments with up to 24 fibre pairs, with a capacity of 20Tbs per fibre pair. Its festoon architecture is said to offer a unique design. Designed as an open-access system, Medusa will look to offer telecom providers across the region with access to advanced connectivity services, supporting the roll-out of 5G, the growth of cloud infrastructure, and the increasing bandwidth demands of AI and future technologies.
Operationally, Medusa will have two main regions, which are Europe and North Africa. In Europe, it has local operational branches in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Cyprus. These branches hold licenses and permits, and the Network Operations Centre is based in Europe. In North Africa, Medusa has agreements with local licensed operators for landing parties.
The EU said the move demonstrated its commitment to reinforcing digital connectivity, supporting the rapid growth of data traffic driven by digital transformation and AI, additionally enabling new opportunities for digital services, investments and innovation.
