Medusa subsea cable to reach Jordan through NaiTel's Coral Bridge link
Medusa will connect to Jordan by integrating with NaiTel's Coral Bridge cable and taking colocation space at Aqaba Digital Hub.
The Medusa Submarine Cable System is extending into Jordan under an agreement with NaiTel, the telecom arm of carrier-neutral data centre operator Aqaba Digital Hub (ADH), Developing Telecoms reports.
The deal, announced on Thursday, ties Medusa to Coral Bridge, a 15 km cable between Taba in Egypt and Aqaba in Jordan that NaiTel built with Telecom Egypt and that entered service last year. Medusa will set up colocation capacity at ADH, and the two companies plan to link Medusa's subsea system with NaiTel's regional and international network.
Medusa chief executive Norman Albi said the arrangement lets operators and customers connected at ADH reach Europe directly over Medusa, and gives the cable an open-access gateway into Jordan and the wider Middle East. ADH founder and chief executive Eyad Abu Khorma said Jordan is positioned to act as a bridge between the Mediterranean and the rest of the region.
A Mediterranean system still being built out
Medusa is an 8,760 km system with a design capacity of 480 Tbps across 24 fibre pairs. Its landing points span Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, and Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia on the southern shore. Funding comes from AFR-IX Telecom, Orange and the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF Digital) programme.
The France-to-Tunisia segment, known as ViaTunisia, went live earlier this year. According to the report, AFR-IX Telecom also intends to take the cable down Africa's western coast and has secured backing from the European Commission and the US Trade and Development Agency for that extension.