Telecom Italia's international services arm Sparkle has announced a collaboration with Google and others to build two new undersea cable systems to expand communication routes between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Sparkle said the Blue system will connect Italy, France, Greece and Israel, while Raman will connect Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Oman and India.
Both Blue and Raman will be equipped with 16 fibre pairs and embrace open cable concepts and an open landing station, enabling competitive access to cable termination points, said Sparkle. It added that Blue will be deployed along a new northbound route in the Mediterranean, crossing the Strait of Messina, rather than following the traditional route through the Sicilian channel.
Within the Blue System, Sparkle said its existing BlueMed submarine cable will now share its wet components with four additional fibre pairs and an initial design capacity of more than 25 Tbps per fibre pair. It will be extended up to Jordan (Aqaba) with additional private branches into France (Corsica), Greece (Chania – Crete), Italy (Golfo Aranci – Sardinia and Rome), Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Turkey, Cyprus and more in the future.
Blue and Raman are expected to be ready for service in 2024, with the Tyrrhenian part of BlueMed planned to be operational as early as 2022. The partners said consortium members intend to make additional landings and connect the two systems through terrestrial network assets.
Google revealed that the Raman cable is named after Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, an Indian physicist who won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work centred on light scattering, a foundational principle in the field of optics that enables any underwater network cable. A trip across the Mediterranean also prompted Raman to work out that the sea is blue because water itself causes blue light to scatter.
