By Anthony O. Miller
CYTA has taken yet another step to position the island as the region’s pre- eminent communications hub, with undersea fibre-optic connections that will eventually hook it up as far as Singapore.
The private Israeli company, Med-1 Submarine Cables Ltd, has just finished laying an undersea cable linking Israel, Cyprus and Sicily, Cyta Assistant General Manager Kyriacos Christodoulides said yesterday. It is to be commissioned in mid-March in Israel.
Cyprus’ $5 million investment in Med-1 gives Cyta a 7.25 per cent share in the company, a seat on the board, and revenues for maintaining the cable’s touchdown station in Cyprus, he said.
Med-1 planned to bypass Cyprus and go from Israel to Italy, Christodoulides said: “Cyprus was out of the picture. We contacted them and managed to persuade them to lay the cable to Cyprus.”
With the Med-1’s Tel Aviv-Paphos-Sicily links, “now we have additional cable access to Israel, and then additional access from Cyprus to Italy,” he said.
The new Med-1 cable is the second fibre-optic one linking Cyprus directly with Israel. The first cable also has links with Syria and Lebanon.
Cyprus is also linked to an international undersea fibre-optic cable highway that begins in Marseilles and ends up in Singapore via Egypt, Christodoulides said.
“Via a spur of this highway, from Alexandria to… very close to Zygi,” he said, Cyprus is hooked to this second undersea highway, and through it, “we have access all over the world.”
Cyprus’s third undersea fibre-optic links go from Paphos to Crete to Marseilles. “The three (undersea) cables come from the European countries and can be switched to two other highways, one going east and west, the other going only west,” he said.
A fourth undersea fibre-optic cable – “the longest and most expensive cable system in the world” – is to be begun in July, Christodoulides said. Cyta’s share of its $1.4-billion price tag is $28.5 million, he added.
This cable – the “Sea-Me-We-3” (Southeast Asia, Middle East, Western Europe) – will run from Northern Germany to Belgium, France and Britain, and connect with Italy, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and Morocco, before running out to Singapore, he said.
There it will connect with the Middle East and Gulf states, as well as India, Pakistan, Thailand and Southeast Asia, before splitting off from its Singapore hub to Australia on one leg, and Japan and South Korea on its other one, he explained.
“Cyprus has a direct link on this cable,” Christodoulides said. “We are co- owners, we are investors… All these countries’ traffic… joins the Cyprus traffic, and we all go outside these countries (onto the world’s cable highways),” he said.
“This is the beauty of the Cyprus Hub, which was a dream in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It is a must now – that anything that passes Cyprus must also land in Cyprus. Otherwise, the Cyprus Hub concept is dead.”
“We believe whoever owns the capacity will survive,” in the world of global communications, Christodoulides said, especially after EU accession forces the Cyprus government to privatise Cyta to join the global telecommunications competition.
