Sparkle received the “Best Subsea Innovation” prize at the Global Carrier Awards ceremony, held in London within the Capacity Europe 2022 event to celebrate the achievements in wholesale telecoms in the past year. At their 18th edition, GCAs are the telecoms’ largest celebration of innovation, vision and excellence across the industry worldwide. Commenting on this achievement, Elisabetta Romano, CEO of Sparkle, underlined that it “brings Italian technology, creativity and inventive back to the centre of the global TLC ecosystem".

A jury - made up of an independent panel of more than twenty judges from top global research and consultancy firms, trade media and industry associations - acknowledged the innovative scope of Sparkle’s Genoa Landing Platform, a new infrastructure designed to ensure the sustainable landing of submarine cables seeking diversified access to the major European hubs.

The heart of the infrastructure is the multi-ducts underwater installation known as “Bore Pipe”, which allows the safe landing of eight different cables, two of which are dedicated to the BlueMed/BlueRaman submarine cable systems. Excavated to a depth of one metre along a 1 km route, the Bore Pipe reaches the beach where, from the “Beach Manhole”, the cables continue through an existing network of tunnels and galleries that run beneath the ground at a depth of 2 metres for 6 km up to the Lagaccio landing station, an open and neutral colocation facility and point of interconnection with other submarine cables as well as national and continental terrestrial networks.

Sparkle's Genoa Landing Platform has been acknowledged by the jury as a remarkable innovation for the subsea sector due to its diversification potential to other European landing points, the resilience and scalability of its underground and submarine landing infrastructure, as well as the reduced impact on the city and the marine environment.