Medusa, the submarine fiber optic cable system owned by AFR-IX Telecom, an infrastructure and licensed telecommunication operator that delivers internet and data services across Africa, has landed at a cable landing station in Marseille, France.
This marks Medusa’s first landing and is described as a major milestone in the cable’s rollout across the Mediterranean.
The initial segment of Medusa will link Marseille with Bizerte in Tunisia and Nador in Morocco, with landings expected between late October and December. This will be followed by the deployment of the remaining landings throughout 2026.
AFR-IX says this first connection between the two shores of the Mediterranean brings to life Medusa’s ambitious vision: deploying over 8,700 kilometres of submarine cable to interconnect Southern Europe and North Africa, with 19 landings.
The system will feature segments with up to 24 fibre pairs, each offering a capacity of 20 Tbit/s. The first phase will be ready for service at the beginning of 2026.
The choice of Marseille as the first landing point was strategic: its location has made it a major hub for data centres and a key node for submarine cable interconnections.
This part of the project has been co-financed by the European Union through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme, under two AFR-IX projects – called ATMED – DG (Atlantic-Mediterranean Data Gateway) and ATMED Nador – which aim to strengthen connectivity between Europe and North Africa.
Medusa is a neutral and independent submarine cable system that will connect 12 countries across North Africa and Southern Europe — Portugal, Morocco, Spain, France, Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, Malta, Libya, Greece, Cyprus and Egypt — through a phased deployment across its various landing points.
Medusa will also serve as a corridor linking the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean (with a landing in Portugal) and to the Red Sea (via Aqaba, Jordan).
