Built in partnership with Albtelecom, the incumbent telco in Albania, Albania Crossing is already operational and crosses Albania, the Bari-Durres subsea cable and the Italian backbone.
This in turn, creates the shortest path from Athens to Milan with the option to reach all the other major hubs in Western Europe, using Sparkle’s extensive continental network.
Albania Crossing differentiates itself as a fast and diversified route from the Balkans to Western Europe, delivering lower latency compared to existing terrestrial routes connecting Athens with Milan. As a result, telcos and content providers can leverage diversified and reliable capacity solutions, available in 100G multiples.
Albania Crossing is Sparkle’s sixth route connecting the south-eastern area of the Mediterranean basin to the rest of the world, joining its existing subsea ring and terrestrial fibre links through Sofia.
Albania Crossing forms part of Sparkles wider expansion strategy that sees Athens as an increasingly relevant regional cross-point and Milan as a Internet and Cloud hub in mainland Europe to meet the connectivity needs between the Balkans, Middle East and Europe.
In related news, earlier this month Sparkle announced the expansion of its Nibble network to northern Europe.
Announced back in 2019, Nibble is built on a 6,500km photonic backbone, connecting Sparkle's two major subsea landing stations in Sicily - Palermo and Catania - with Milan, Marseille, Frankfurt and Paris to the West and with Athens, Istanbul and Tel Aviv to the East.
The network leverages different fibre-optic backbones for high reliability as well as DWDM technologies that deliver high-performance, low-latency and high speeds.
The latest announcement means that by July 2021, Nibble will extend by a further 6,300km to northern Europe, interconnecting London, Amsterdam and Brussels, bringing it to a total length of 12,800km.
