Undersea cables are no longer just infrastructure – they have become geo-economic arteries, defining who controls the flow of data and, by extension, informational power. At YourNewsClub, we note that the start of the Medusa system deployment by Telco Orange is not a routine telecom event. It is a strategic move to establish a new data corridor between Africa and the European Union, bypassing traditional choke points and redistributing control over the network architecture of the future digital economy.
Medusa – a project by AFR-IX Telecom spanning 8,760 km – is built with up to 24 fiber pairs, each capable of transmitting 20 Tbps. For the first time, North African nations – Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Egypt – are connecting to the EU not via legacy transit hubs in Western Europe or the Middle East, but directly to Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Cyprus. YourNewsClub interface architecture analyst Maya Renn explains: “This cable is not just a connection. It is the digital equivalent of a trade route, where data becomes a commodity and bandwidth becomes a new currency of influence.”
What makes Medusa unique is its open access architecture – designed not as a closed consortium route but as a shared infrastructure layer for operators in 5G, cloud computing and AI ecosystems. This breaks the legacy model of gated bandwidth controlled by a handful of telecom giants. In practice, this creates a new “market layer” above physical infrastructure, accelerating the deployment of AI services on both shores of the Mediterranean.
Medusa is structured with two operational zones: a European layer and a North African one. EU-based operational branches are registered in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Cyprus, while licensed African operators hold the landing rights. This dual governance reduces geopolitical risk and increases network resilience. Freddy Camacho, digital capital systems analyst at YourNewsClub, puts it bluntly: “A split governance model is a signal to the market – this cable is not a monopoly lane. It’s a declaration of a new connectivity economy where traffic isn’t routed by politics, but by network efficiency.”
Orange is not merely a contractor – it is actively positioning Marseille as a digital gateway city. By linking it to 17 global undersea cable routes with direct access to major data centers in Paris, London and Frankfurt, it effectively installs Marseille as a control node in the European cloud ecosystem. The Marseille–Bizerte segment of the Medusa system received co-funding from the EU under the Global Gateway and Connecting Europe Facility frameworks, confirming that this is not simply a telecom venture but part of an active digital sovereignty policy by Brussels.
The cable is supplied by Alcatel Submarine Networks, and deployed by telecom vessels Teliri and Sophie Germain under Orange subsidiary Elettra. The company openly emphasizes compliance with security, environmental and regulatory standards – a clue that submarine cables are now treated with the same strategic oversight as energy pipelines.
At YourNewsClub, all indicators point to Medusa as the beginning of a digital integration wave, not the conclusion of a cable project. The next phase could see a distributed network of data centers emerging across North Africa, enabling local AI and fintech services to operate without routing traffic through Frankfurt or Amsterdam. This signals the rise of a new category of digital markets – not as consumers of global infrastructure but as producers of data flow and compute capacity.
In YourNewsClub we view submarine cables as a new class of strategic assets: they no longer simply service the internet – they shape digital sovereignty. And it is this shift that markets will need to adapt to long before they realize that connectivity is no longer just about access, but about control.