An Emerging Subsea Telecom Hub: Genoa

Marseille with its 16 cables tightly squeezed into reserved sea lanes and landing facilities violates the cardinal rule of network diversity. It's highly efficient, but resiliency requires physical diversity. In general, resiliency costs money because it requires not relying solely on the big interconnection points. There is a fundamental conflict between minimizing costs and maximizing network performance. This has led consortiums and the digital titans to seek other landing points. Besides being a long distance from Marseille and on a separate power grid, Genoa offers lower latency access to Italy's eyeballs as well as Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. It has clear advantages.

Landing cables at Genoa is more challenging than Marseille because there is less deep sea and more continental shelf. The cables must be threaded between Sardinia, Corsica, and Italy. As the relief map shows, this important ship corridor is more shallow. So the cables must be buried deeper to avoid those infamous cable predators, namely anchors and trawlers.

Both 2Africa and Blue-Raman land at Genoa. The 2Africa terminal equipment is in Equinix Genoa (GN1). Equinix has an interesting strategy. They pick cities where subsea cables might land, buy an existing structure, upgrade it, and then capture the subsea cable business. Then Equinix builds a brand new data centre. This also is what happened in Lisbon where LS1 was a former industrial building and LS2 will be built from the ground up.

Sparkle lands the Blue cable at Genoa. In addition, the French carrier Sipartech has built the Medloop cable which links Barcelona (another emerging telecom hub), Marseille, and Genoa. Not only does this provide back up links, but it allows for a more efficient, low latency distribution of traffic. In addition to 2Africa and Blue-Raman, other cables are coming. EMC-West links Genoa to the Northernmost point of Saudi Arabia with landings in Greece and Israel. Another regional carrier is Uniterreno, which connects all of Italy's territories, the Boot, Sicily, and Sardinia with landings in Genoa, near Rome, and at Olbia, a city on the Northeastern coast of Sardinia.