Interoute opens new diverse fibre route in Southern Italy to help subsea cables connect to Europe

Interoute has added a third route to access its pan European fibre network, from two of its submarine cable landing stations in Southern Italy. The new 1,300 km stretch of fibre is part of Interoute’s 7,000 km Italian network, which helps make up its 67,000km pan European platform. The new route will provide diverse, high capacity connectivity from Interoute’s landing stations in Mazara del Vallo (Sicily) and Bari (Puglia), for submarine cables looking to connect to Europe. In recent years cables from Greece, Malta, Tunisia and Israel have all come ashore at Interoute’s Southern Italian landing stations.

Submarine cables play an integral role in international economic cooperation and social development, providing terabits of reliable capacity between the world’s major economies while also enabling critical applications in developing countries and fast growing economies. Driven by the increasing demand for internet services and bandwidth hungry applications, Terabit Consulting identified 160 new submarine cable projects, with a total value of $22.6 billion, which are confirmed to be under consideration by operators and project developers. In the same report[i], Terabit Consulting estimates that 37% of new Credible Proposed Submarine Fibre Optic Projects will involve the regions of South Asia, Middle East, Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean. For all these new cable developments Interoute is positioning itself as the premier destination for operators from outside Europe who want to get into Europe.

The design of the new route is planned to support 8 Terabit/s of traffic, offering wavelength service up to 100Gbit/s. More significantly though, thanks to this new route, Interoute can now offer its customers three completely diverse routes from both Mazara del Vallo and from Bari, to the major cities connected on its pan-European network. This not only reduces the vulnerability and risks associated with a single point of failure, but it enables significantly shortened submarine cable routes by offering an alternative landing point in the South of Italy to those further afield, such as Marseille.

Renzo Ravaglia, Interoute EVP, Service Provider said, "With this further expansion of its network Interoute is making Southern Italy the most attractive landing point for all the submarine cables wanting to reach Europe, that come from the Far East, Middle East and Africa. With Cisco estimating that the Middle Eastern and African regions will continue to have the highest growth of IP traffic until 2018, predicting a fivefold growth with a compound annual growth rate of 38% (Cisco Visual Networking index, 2014) the demand for broadband services looks set to keep rising.”

With this investment the South of Italy is on track to become one of the main exchange points for the European internet network. Submarine cables entering the Mediterranean will now find a landing point that is able to offer high levels of diversity and the capacity required to support future demand.