Communications company GO is investing €25 million in an undersea cable which will link Malta with France and Egypt.
The company said it will become the first company to have undersea cables linked to more than one country, with all current links being to Italy.
This will also be the first communications cable on the west of Malta instead of the east.
The company said the cable project, to be called La Valette will form part of the international PEACE project (Pakistan East Africa Connecting Europe) linking several countries.
“Our purpose is to drive a digital Malta where no one is left behind. Over the last five years we have invested over €100 million in digital infrastructure in Malta to bring our purpose to life. We plan to invest at least another €100 million over the next 5 years", said GO CEO Nikhil Patel.
The project was formally launched by Prime Minister Robert Abela on Tuesday.
He praised the company, saying connectivity also meant increased competitiveness for the country as it was key to attracting investment.
The project. he said, fitted into the government's plans to further improve the infrastructure.
He also praised GO for having committed to invest €100 million on its digital network in Malta over the next five years. This was evidence of private sector confidence in the future of the county, he said.
Cable to be completed by February 2022
The PEACE cable will have a total length of 12,000km, of which 3,785km will be in the Mediterranean. The completion date is expected to be February next year with connection points in Pakistan, Kenya, Egypt, Malta, Cyprus, France, Saudi Arabia and Singapore.
The project has been entrusted to PCCW Global, whose representative, Tamer El Gazzar, said this would be a high capacity fibre cable, making it the fastest communications link between Malta and France, and Malta and the Middle East with access to data centres in France, Egypt, Djibouti and Kenya.
Controversial project
Bloomberg news agency reported in March that the PEACE cable will travel overland from China to Pakistan, where it heads underwater terminating in France. It is being built by Chinese companies and will be able to transport enough data in one second for 90,000 hours of Netflix. It will largely serve to make service faster for Chinese companies doing business in Europe and Africa.
The project also represents a new flashpoint in the geopolitics of the internet, Bloomberg said. Huawei Technologies Co., the company at the centre of a long-simmering struggle between China and the U.S., is the third-largest shareholder in Hengtong Optic-Electric Co.—the company building the cable. Huawei is also making the equipment for the PEACE cable landing stations and its underwater transmission gear.