The ViaTunisia subsea cable segment between Marseille in France, and Bizerte in Tunisia, has reached Ready for Service (RFS) marking the transition from construction to full operational availability on a direct and resilient new route between southern Europe and North Africa.
From infrastructure design to live connectivity
The journey to RFS began long before the cable touched the seabed. Designed as an open, point-to-point system with a 25-year design life, ViaTunisia moved through each phase: marine surveys, factory acceptance tests, cable loading, laying, shore landings and final splicing. Marine operations were carried out by Orange Marine’s Sophie Germain and Elettra TLC’s Teliri cableships, under the coordination of Elettra TLC, with system design and equipment delivered by Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN).
A European-supported infrastructure
ViaTunisia was co-financed by the European Union under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF Digital) program.
The Grant Agreement, signed in December 2022, provided funding covering 30% of the construction and management costs. This demonstrates the EU’s commitment to reinforcing digital connectivity, supporting the rapid growth of data traffic driven by digital transformation and AI, and enabling new opportunities for digital services, investments, and innovation.
Creating a new digital bridge between Europe and Africa
ViaTunisia extends directly into Orange’s global infrastructure in Marseille, through a fully redundant urban fibre ring connecting all the data centres in the city. This set up enables seamless interconnexion and distribution of international capacity across Europe.
By combining the resilience, security and performance of a global backbone with Marseille’s role as a leading interconnection hub, ViaTunisia provides direct, high-capacity connectivity between North Africa and the wider digital world. It also multiplies route options in this area, especially in natural disaster-prone areas, minimising outages caused by cable failures, thus improving overall network resilience.
