New Tunisia-France Submarine Cable Will be Installed by Orange

The French telecommunications company Orange will install a new subsea cable linking France and Tunisia. A 650-mile cable from Marseille to Bizerte will be built thanks to a grant from the EU's "Connecting Europe Facility" (CEF) program, the company announced this week. The cable is expected to provide "several fiber pairs," each with a 20 Tbps capacity, upon commissioning, which is planned for the end of 2025. The project's cost wasn't disclosed. The India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) cable is housed at Orange's cable landing station (CLS) in Marseille's Bonneveine neighborhood. In 2010, that cable went into operation. The arrival of the Medusa cable, owned by AFR-IX, at Orange's CLS in Marseille was announced in December. With additional stops in Barcelona, Torreguadiaro, Zahara, and Alacant in Spain, Tétouan and Nador in Morocco, Bizerte in Tunisia, Algiers and Collo in Algeria, Marseille in France, Mazara del Vallo in Italy, Yeroskipou in Cyprus, and Tympaki in Greece, Medusa, which was announced in January 2022, will connect Lisbon and Sines, Portugal to Port Said, Egypt.

More than a dozen cables, including 2Africa, Africa-1, the Peace cable, and SeaMeWe-4, have landing points in Marseille. The SeaMeWe-4 cable is currently landing in Bizerte. Along with the new cables from Medusa and Orange, the PCCW-led Europe-Asia Peace cable is also scheduled to arrive there in collaboration with Ooredoo Tunisia. The Didon, Hannibal, and Trapani-Kelibia cable systems, which all cross the Strait of Sicily to land at Mazara del Vallo on the Italian island of Sicily, have a second landing point in Tunisia at Kelibia.