Sparkle and GÉANT have strengthened their partnership through three new capacity agreements covering the Slough–Allan, Marseille–Cairo and Lagos–Cape Town routes, enhancing connectivity for research and education networks such as ASREN, WACREN and the UbuntuNet Alliance.
Cooperation between network operators and academic communities has intensified with a new wave of international links designed to support research and education. Sparkle has been selected by GÉANT for three tenders that will expand capacity along strategic routes connecting Europe, Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, with immediate benefits for national and regional science networks.
Why do these routes matter? Because they are more than additional fiber links: they represent critical nodes for scientific cooperation. Connections such as Slough–Allan and Marseille–Cairo integrate regional points of presence with research centers, reducing latency and increasing the data transfer capacity needed for data-intensive experiments. The project also supports digital inclusion and cooperation goals promoted by the European Union within several multi-regional initiatives.
Thanks to these new connections, the pan-European GÉANT network will strengthen its services to National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), supporting access to shared resources, cloud platforms and the secure sharing of large datasets. For researchers, this translates into real-time collaboration on international experiments, backed by connectivity built for high-performance needs.
The Three Connections: Destinations and Purpose
Each route serves a specific function within the broader fabric of international research networks.
The first connects Slough, in the United Kingdom, with Allan, in Jordan, creating a direct link to the SESAME center (the region’s leading synchrotron light laboratory) and improving interoperability with ASREN (Arab States Research and Education Network). This connection facilitates cross-border scientific activity and access to advanced experimental infrastructure.
The second route, between Marseille and Cairo, directly links ENSTINET (the Egyptian National Scientific and Technical Information Network) with the broader ASREN ecosystem and with Europe via GÉANT’s backbone, boosting the exchange of data and educational resources between the Mediterranean and the European continent. This initiative is part of EUMEDplus, a project co-funded by the European Union to strengthen digital infrastructure, connectivity and scientific cooperation between Mediterranean Arab countries and Europe. The goal here is to streamline the transfer of academic content and facilitate institutional collaboration.
The third connection spans southern and western Africa: a Lagos–Cape Town route linking the new Global Exchange Point (GXP) in Nigeria with the ZAOXI GXP in Cape Town. This link has enabled the first effective interconnection between African regional research and education networks. For WACREN (West and Central African Research and Education Network), the new route enables interoperability with the UbuntuNet Alliance via SANReN and TENET. The result is the creation of a continental research backbone, made possible by the AfricaConnect3 project, co-funded by the European Union.
A Long-Standing Partnership Looking Ahead
The collaboration between Sparkle and GÉANT is not new: it dates to the early 2010s and has evolved to include cloud services and capacity provision under dedicated frameworks.
Sparkle, the first international service provider in Italy and among the top global operators, with its own submarine cable network and more than 600,000 km of fiber infrastructure continues to serve as a technical partner in building resilient infrastructure.
From the GÉANT side, the network is expanded and now reaches tens of millions of users across thousands of institutions and interconnects with more than 110 countries at capacities of up to 1.6 Tb/s.
The shared ambition is to develop high-performance digital infrastructure that supports international research and access to specialized cloud services.
Ultimately, these new routes represent a concrete step toward reducing digital barriers for the academic and scientific world: they facilitate data sharing, accelerate collaboration timelines and strengthen cooperation across continents – underscoring how connectivity remains a strategic driver of global innovation.
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