Syria, Cyprus Sign Ebla Cable Agreement

Nawal Jeles, SANA
September 13, 2026

Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology says an agreement has been signed to establish the Ebla submarine cable. The parties are Syria’s state communications operator, Cyprus carrier Cyta and US-based UNIFI Communications. The pact moves the project into implementation and gives it a defined route between Tartous and Cyprus’s TATCYNOS cable station, where Cyta’s network will provide onward connections to Europe and other global destinations. It is a distinct system from the UGARIT 2 agreement reported in August, so the September agreement represents a separate infrastructure program rather than a repeated milestone.

Ebla is designed with 24 optical-fiber pairs and an initial capacity of 31 terabits per second, expandable to 370 Tbps. The ministry expects the system to replace AUGER, the country’s direct Cyprus link that entered service in 1995 and now provides about 2 Tbps after upgrades completed in 2025. That capacity step, combined with a modern cable design, would materially expand Syria’s international bandwidth and create more room for cloud services, video communications, data hosting and digital-government traffic.

The announcement also assigns work to named suppliers. Marine survey activity is underway on the Tartous-Cyprus route; NSW, a Prysmian subsidiary, is responsible for marine cable works, Elettra will handle installation and Nokia will provide transmission equipment. Syria says Ebla will connect with the planned SilkLink open-access terrestrial network, which is intended to distribute international capacity among cities, data centers, licensed operators and border crossings. A separate planned Medusa landing station would add another Mediterranean route.

For cable owners and operators, Ebla’s significance lies in route diversity as much as headline capacity. A new direct system through Cyprus could provide alternative paths during outages, strengthen competition for international capacity and broaden access between Syria, Europe, the Gulf and Asia. Installation, testing and trial operations are scheduled before an early-2028 service target, but the ministry says completion remains subject to licensing, marine conditions and vessel availability. Those dependencies make the active survey and later installation milestones the next indicators of progress.

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