Sparkle, the first international service provider in Italy and among the top ten global operators, announces the launch of Albania Crossing, the new direct route connecting Athens to Milan.
Built in cooperation with Albtelecom, the largest telecommunication company in Albania, and already operational, the new optical fiber link crosses Albania, the Bari-Durres submarine cable and the Italian backbone, establishing the shortest path from Athens to Milan with the possibility to reach all the other major hubs in Western Europe, thanks to Sparkle’s extensive continental network.
Albania Crossing sets itself as a fast and diversified route from the Balkans to Western Europe, offering the best performance in terms of latency compared to existing terrestrial links connecting Athens with Milan. As a result, regional and international telecom players and content providers can benefit from 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, in addition to the existing submarine ring and to the terrestrial fiber links through Sofia, thus enabling the implementation of a robust and fully redundant connectivity.
The new link is part of a wider expansion strategy that leverages on Athens as an increasingly relevant regional cross-point and on Milan as a gravitational Internet and Cloud hub in mainland Europe to cater the needs of diversified and resilient connectivity between the Balkans, Middle East and Europe.
About Sparkle
Sparkle is TIM Group’s fully owned Global Operator, first international service provider in Italy and among the top ten worldwide, with a proprietary backbone of more than 600,000 km of fiber spanning from Europe to Africa, the Americas and Asia. Leveraging its global IP, Data, Cloud, Data Center, Mobile Data and Voice Platforms, Sparkle offers a full range of ICT solutions to Enterprises, Internet Service Providers, OTTs, Media and Content Players, Application Service Providers as well as Fixed and Mobile operators. Its sales force is active worldwide and distributed over 33 countries.
Find out more about Sparkle following its Twitter and LinkedIn profiles or visiting the website tisparkle.com.
Rome, 23 June 2021
