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The Kardesa submarine cable system will connect Bulgaria, Georgia, Turkey, and Ukraine
This week, Vodafone Group and Vodafone Ukraine have announced their intentions to build a new submarine cable spanning the Black Sea, the first for almost two decades.
The €116 million Kardesa cable will include landings in Bulgaria, Georgia, Turkey, and Ukraine, notably excluding Russia.
It is expected to deliver an additional 500 Tbps of capacity to the Black Sea region, providing a much-needed altnerative for limited and aging infrastructure currently in the area.
The cable is being built by specialist Xtera, with the first cable landing expected to be built in Bulgaria in 2027.
Given its prominence as a gateway to the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea is currently home to surprisingly few submarine cables. Here’s the region’s subsea cable infrastructure at a glance from Telegeography’s subsea cable map.
Source: Telegeography
Along the west coast runs Turk Telecom’s KAFOS cable (purple), connecting Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. On the east coast, is a system simply known as the Georgia–Russia cable (orange), built by the two nation’s operators to connect the countries in 2000.
The only cable currently spanning the Black Sea is the 2008 Caucasus Cable (pink), linking Bulgaria to Georgia. Another route crossing the sea – a joint energy and telecoms system called the Black Sea Submarine Cable (BSSC), running from Georgia to Romania – was announced last year.
Finally, the tiny cluster of dots at the north of the picture, at the entrance to the Sea of Azov, is in fact two cables: Russian telco Miranda Media’s Kerch Strait (blue) and Energy Bridge (orange) cables.
The question of why there are so few Black Sea subsea cables, while nuanced, can be broadly answered in two parts. Firstly, the digital economies in South and Southeast Asia have grown far more rapidly than their Central counterparts. As a result, routes passing along Asia’s south coast and through the Red Sea, have become highly developed, reducing the need for a Black Sea crossing to Europe. Secondly, the Blacks Sea’s geopolitical sensitivity has made building routes difficult, presenting projects with a myriad of complex regulatory and security challenges.
For the Kardesa cable, on the other hand, geopolitics is a major motivator. The cable will offer regional traffic a route that does not pass through Russian territory, which Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said he hoped would help “establish Ukraine as a key hub for internet traffic between Europe and Asia, bypassing Russia”.
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