The Government has requested all the permits and invests €800.000 more in order to increase the impact of the landing station
  • Catalonia will be the first world submarine cable digital port. It will be the entrance point and the fastest connection to the USA of cables coming from Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean.
  • Barcelona Cable Landing Station is an initiative by the Catalan company AFR-IX Telecom. It will be in Sant Adrià de Besòs and it represents a key infrastructure for the arrival of submarine full fibre-optic cables in the Mediterranean.
  • It will start operating the first quarter of 2022 with the aim of being a leading digital port in the Mediterranean; it could mean an increase of 2-4% of Catalonia's GDP the following four years.
  • The submarine cable digital port: a strategic infrastructure for the Catalan digital economy

Representatives from the Ministry for Digital Policy and Public Administration of the Catalan Government, the City Council of Sant Adrià de Besòs and the IT company AFR-IX Telecom have presented Barcelona Cable Landing Station, the first international submarine cable landing station built in Catalonia.

This infrastructure is expected to start operating the first quarter of 2022 with the aim of being a leading digital port in the Mediterranean and it is presented as a digital port to enable the arrival of cables with no restrictions. The fact that a single landing station is the arrival point of many cables optimises resources and avoids more constructions.

It is an innovative proposal, because normally every cable-owner company needs to build its own landing station for the cable connection.

Currently, Marseille receives most of submarine fibre-optic cables of the Mediterranean region; its saturation is obvious and the need for other landing station such as Barcelona CLS is clear.


On Submarine Fibre-Optic Cables


Internet would not be possible without the extensive submarine fibre-optic cables connecting continents as information motorways to transport data. According to the last data available by the Submarine Cable Map, there are about 400 submarine cables around the world, that is a volume of 1.2 million kilometres of submarine cables.

Submarine fibre-optic cables are irreplaceable, they are more efficient than satellite connections, because a cable is estimated to have a transferring capacity of 2 to 3 thousand satellites. Therefore, it is a strategic move for Catalonia to have its own international port for international submarine fibre-optic cables, enabling the construction of Barcelona Cable Landing Station (Barcelona CLS) in Sant Adrià de Besòs.

It will be in Sant Adrià de Besòs

Sant Adrià is the perfect location for the project: it has excellent connections to all fibre-optic networks of the country, either road or railway connections, it does not have physical limitation for the entrance of the cables, which will be buried 2 meter deep in the coast, they will not emit any kind of radiation and Sant Adrià coast is less eroded than other areas of Barcelona.

22@, where it will be located, is expected to be an innovation hub and to expand to Sant Adrià, and when this happens, Barcelona CLS will play a leading role.