The Medusa cable system is a 8760km submarine cable system connecting five Mediterranean EU countries (Cyprus, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) with four countries from the EU's Southern Neighbourhood (Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia), owned by AFR-IX telecom and supported by the EU's Economic and Investment plan for the Southern Neighbourhood.
The Medusa cable system consists of landing points in:
The Medusa cable system consists of 24 fibre pairs, designed with 20Tbs per fibre pair for a total system capacity of 480Tbps, deployed with protection and predictive maintenance of submarine cable infrastructures (PSI) and an intelligent monitoring system based on DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) technology.
The Medusa cable system is owned by AFR-IX telecom, in partnership with the University of Alcalá, the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) and Aragón Photonics, supplied by Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), to be operational between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025.
The Medusa cable project is estimated to cost €342 million (US$374 million), funding in part by the European Investment Bank (EIB) for a €40 million EU grant and a debt finance for the infrastructure with a contribution of up to €100 million in loans.