MILAN, Apr 14 (Class Editori) – Twenty-five thousand kilometers of optical fiber that runs partly under the sea from South Italy to China: the project involving 19 companies cost 850 million dollars and now looks like the underwater Silk Road in the Indian Ocean bottom.
"Through this cable which in fact anticipates the Silk Road", said Federico Protto, Retelit general manager and CEO in an interview with Italia Oggi, "Europe, from Bari, is connected with Middle and Far East and with India. As the United States is doing, Europe and Italy as well must look to those markets, potentially the most interesting for the future of business".
The company listed in the Piazza Affari Star segment, with 100 employees and 73 million of turnover, which is expected to rise to 78 million in 2019, is the Italian representative of the consortium of companies involved in the project.
The company target – which deals with digital services and infrastructures for businesses – is to make Bari a strategic hub to convey data traffic, undermining the primacy of Marseille in the Mediterranean.
"We believe that Southern Italy represents a fundamental opportunity to collect and move the traffic that comes from Southern Europe", explained Protto last November at AdnKronos, detailing the construction of a network in the South that also includes Sicily, and commenting the doubling of the transmission capacity of the AAE-1 cable from 100 GB to 200 GB that is two years ahead of schedule.
The company was founded in 1999. The three largest shares belong to a Libyan (14%), Italian (12.8%), German (9.9%) fund. It has 12,500 kilometers of cables located mainly under the large cities of the Center-North and 15 Data Centers. "We have a growth programme through acquisitions", the CEO continued in the interview with Italia Oggi. "The sector is very fragmented, there are about 200 operators offering optical fiber connections, obviously most of them only at a local level. We plan to expand our national territory coverage by incorporating some of these operators. On the other hand, digitization has entered the business world powerfully, there is so much demand, data must circulate safely and be interpreted in real time, only structured groups can be appropriate interlocutors".
(Source:Class Editori)
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