A new digital highway is taking shape beneath the Mediterranean Sea, one that will physically connect North Africa to Europe with high-speed fibre optic cables and help close the digital divide between the two continents.
Called the Medusa Submarine Cable System , it spans 8,760 kilometres along the seafloor and is one of the most ambitious connectivity projects ever launched in the region. It will link countries such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt with Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Cyprus, and potentially Greece. At the centre of this cross-continental effort is Nokia , providing the core technology to make it possible.
The effort comes as demand for cloud services, artificial intelligence, and 5G expands rapidly across both Africa and Europe.
Backed by an investment of EUR 342 M, with partial EUR 40 M funding from the European Union, Medusa is built to bring fast, reliable, and affordable connectivity to regions where internet access has historically been slow, expensive, or unreliable.
Nokia will equip the system with its 1830 Global Express platform and ICE7 coherent optics, enabling each of Medusa's 24 fibre pairs to deliver 20 terabits per second. This brings the total system capacity to a staggering 480 terabits per second, supporting everything from high-performance mobile networks to large-scale cloud computing.
