Sparkle & Turkcell Building New Subsea Cable Into Turkey
Turkey has bee a very tough market for global ISPs. Until EXA lit terrestrial fibre a few years ago across the Bulgaria's border with Turkey, 100G pricing was $15K per month and above. EXA now dominates the key Frankfurt to Istanbul route with lower pricing. But the situation is not ideal. Physical diversity is an illusion across the narrow border with one conduit system carrying much of the international traffic. Sparkle's old Mednautilus system does provide an alternative to the land routes, but it's primacy has been too high for foreign ISPs in Turkey to flourish. Sparkle has signed a memorandum of understanding with Turkcell to build a subsea cable that will land in the Instanbul suburd of Izmir and at Chania, Greece. The yet unnamed cable will interconnect at Chania, a Greek island, to the BlueMed cable which will carry the traffic to Marseille, Milano, and other key telecom hubs. We have few details on the cable itself other than a target design throughp...
