Garrr... we have connectivity!

"After four weeks of battling stormy seas..."

We don't get many press releases that start with those words. Imagine: "After four weeks of battling stormy seas, Bizmal Technology leveraged version 2.35 of its paradigm-shifting business process management package"...

Anyway, I digress. Here's the full opening sentence: "After four weeks of battling stormy seas, Interoute finally landed the 300km submarine fibre cable at Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, linking Malta with Italy and the rest of Europe."

The point of this is to avoid a repeat of what happened at the start of last year, when three sliced submarine cables off Egypt severely hampered internet communications in the Middle East.

"Until now, Malta's strategic location in the Mediterranean had not been fully capitalised upon by the telecoms industry," the statement says. "This cable allows Malta to secure its position as the 'hub' of the Mediterranean telecoms by increasing the island's broadband capacity by eight times and providing network resiliency and backup it had previously lacked."

Anyway, the project took longer than hoped for thanks to poor weather conditions, which should tell you something about planning delicate cable-laying operations in the middle of the Mediterranean for the middle of winter. Still, good to have that extra resilience now.