Sparkle's BlueMed submarine cable has been laid. The announcement was made yesterday during a press conference in Genoa, in the presence of Marco Bucci, mayor of the city, the President of the Liguria Region Giovanni Toti, the CEO of Sparkle Enrico Bagnasco and Jayne Stowell, Global Infrastructure Strategic Negotiator of Google. BlueMed is the new cable that will connect Italy with France, Greece and Israel, with various branches in the Mediterranean. The cable is part of the Blue Submarine Cable System project and was developed in partnership with Google and other operators with further extensions in the African and Asian continents. With four fiber pairs and an initial transmission capacity of more than 25 Terabits per second (Tbps) per pair, BlueMed will offer high-speed Internet connections and high-performance connectivity solutions to Internet Service Providers (ISPs), carriers, telecom operators, content providers, enterprises and institutions. The laying began on January 31 with the laying of the branch in Sardinia (Golfo Aranci) and continued on February 9 with the landing in Pomezia, on the Roman coast. Thanks to BlueMed, Rome returns to directly overlook the intercontinental communication lines a hundred years after the laying of the cable Anzio - New York - Rio de Janeiro - Buenos Aires by Italcable (precursor of Sparkle). From Genoa, the cable will continue south through the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Sicily hub in Palermo - Sparkle's neutral data center connected with eighteen international cables – from which it will proceed through the Strait of Messina and the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea. The first section Genoa-Golfo Aranci-Pomezia-Palermo will be operational as early as May, while in June 2023 the extension to Corsica in Bastia will also be completed.