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. Indeed, there is a fundamental conflict between minimizing network costs and maximizing performance. This has led consortiums and the digital titans to seek other landing points to reduce Marseille's importance. 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. The city offers clear advantages for a landing spot. 

On the down side, landing cables at Genoa is more challenging than Marseille because cables must traverse more shallow waters to reach it. Cables must be threaded between Sardinia, Corsica, and Italy. As the relief map shows, this important ship corridor is quite shallow because it lies on the continental shelf. Much of it is less than 250 meters deep. Hence any cable landing at Genoa must be buried quite deep to avoid those infamous predators, namely anchors and trawlers.

Genoa's growing importance is highlighted by the fact that both 2Africa and Blue-Raman land three. The 2Africa terminal equipment is in Equinix Genoa (GN1). It is worth mentioning that Equinix has an interesting strategy. They pick cities where subsea cables might land or where the decision has already been made, buy an existing structure, quickly upgrade it, and then capture the subsea cable business. Then Equinix builds a brand new data centre next to the first data centre. This also is what happened in Lisbon where LS1 was a former industrial building and LS2 is a green field project adjacent to LS1. 

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 across the Riviera. 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. Uniterreno should be RFS in 2025.