Sparkle has collaborated with Aruba S.p.A. to bring a new Point of Presence (PoP) to Rome, hosted at Aruba’s Hyper Cloud Data Centre.
The move is designed to boost Rome’s position as a connectivity hub linking Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and utilises the BlueMed cable, which forms part of the broader Blue & Raman Submarine Cable Systems project.
The project, on which Google and other operators are partners, aims to establish robust digital infrastructure routes between Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia with extension as far as India. It is one of the projects being implemented on the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) outlined at the G20 summit in September 2023.
The BlueMed cable, with landings in several Mediterranean locations including Rome, has been designed with an “open cable system” and “open landing station” architecture to ensure openness to other operators. It features four fibre pairs and a capacity of over 25 Tbps per pair.
Aruba’s Hyper Cloud Data Centre lies within the Tecnopolo Tiburtino district, and once fully operational, will feature five independent facilities providing a total of 30 MW of IT power.
“With the activation of the new PoP integrated with BlueMed, we intend to respond to the needs of companies and operators that require large international interconnection capacities,” said Enrico Bagnasco, CEO of Sparkle.
“We bring Rome closer to the world’s major connectivity exchange points thanks to a unique, low-latency route to Marseille and Palermo, integrated with the main submarine cables crossing the Mediterranean and other destinations in Sparkle’s global network.”
Stefano Cecconi, CEO of Aruba, added, “We share with Sparkle the aim of serving companies and operators, that need large capacities, with not only connectivity but also space and power within state-of-the-art data centres that are large enough to support even the most ambitious growth plans.
“Being able to host a Sparkle PoP, with the availability of BlueMed, is an important building block in the consolidation of our data centres as strategic assets at a national and European level, and is perfectly in line with our carrier neutral philosophy. This approach is designed to allow customers to enjoy, in maximum autonomy, extremely reliable and high-performance internet connection solutions, and to foster the development of interconnections that benefit the entire ecosystem, making Rome an additional connectivity hub and an IT and cloud service delivery centre for the capital and all Central and Southern Italy.”
