A subsea infrastructure project, Via Africa, has been unveiled to strengthen connectivity between Europe and Africa, aiming to enhance the resilience and diversity of West Africa’s international communications.

The Via Africa project will comprise a submarine cable system that will connect Europe to Africa along the Atlantic coast, and provide a subsea route alongside existing infrastructure at a time when, says the consortium, demand for cloud services, artificial intelligence (AI) workloads and international traffic is rapidly increasing across the continent.

The communications system aims to connect Europe to South Africa – including landing points in the UK, France and Portugal – with destinations along the Atlantic coastline such as the Canary Islands, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria. Including extensions further south, the net result will be to contribute to greater diversity and resilience of international connectivity serving Africa, by providing a different subsea route than existing infrastructure and strengthening the robustness of regional connectivity.

It will operate under a consortium model, and participating operators will be able to co-invest in the infrastructure and play a direct role in governance, deployment and future operation. By being managed as a consortium, the project is seen as enabling participating partners seeking autonomy and sovereignty to co-invest in the infrastructure and take part in its governance.

They add that such a “robust and proven” model allows investors to participate directly in the decisions regarding the design, deployment and exploitation of the system, and contribute to decisions that best meet their needs.

Major investors that have a signed a memorandum of understanding to initiate the scheme include major European telcos Vodafone and Orange Group, as well as Guilab, International Mauritania Telecom, Orange Côte d’Ivoire, Silverlinks, Senegalese operator Sonatel, and Canalink, whose business connects Africa, the Canary Islands and Europe.

The partners say they have a shared ambition to develop international connectivity, to support traffic growth and to strengthen the resilience of networks across the African continent. The initial telco and digital player partners say they are open to additional partners potentially joining the project in the future.

As part of the initial phase of the project, consortium members will jointly finance a cable route study to identify the optimal cable route that balances resilience, technical feasibility and overall economic efficiency. In parallel, the consortium is preparing the procurement process for selecting a cable supplier, marking the next step in the development of the system.

On behalf of Orange, Via Africa adds to the Medusa Submarine Cable System, designed to transform infrastructure in the Mediterranean region. Owned by African infrastructure and telecoms operator AFR-IX Telecom, and which made its first landing on European soil in October 2025, Medusa is 8,760km long, and will be the first and longest subsea cable to connect the main Mediterranean countries, providing access to telecommunications infrastructure and 16 landing points around the Mediterranean Sea.

Operationally, Medusa has two main regions: Europe and North Africa. In Europe, it has local operational branches in Ireland, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Cyprus. These branches hold licenses and permits. The Network Operations Centre is based in Europe. In North Africa, Medusa has agreements with local licensed operators for landing parties.

Medusa is seen as being crucial for developing the digital ecosystem of populations in North African countries, taking a significant step towards closing the digital divide between Europe and North Africa, connecting countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Egypt with high-capacity fibre-optic links to six European Union member states: Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Cyprus.

While it has enabled many exciting discoveries, the Curiosity Rover has also encountered its share of setbacks. The latest left NASA engineers speechless.

On April 25, Curiosity drilled into a rock nicknamed “Atacama” to collect a sample. When the rover retracted the robotic arm after drilling, the entire rock unexpectedly lifted off the Martian surface—all 28.6 pounds of it. While other Curiosity drilling operations have caused cracks or breaks in the upper layers of Martian rocks during the rover’s nearly 14-year mission, this is the first time one has remained stuck to the sleeve that surrounds the drill’s rotating tip.

As the space agency itself recounts, it was the black-and-white obstacle-detection cameras mounted on the front of the rover’s chassis that captured this peculiar “accident” in a sequence of images that allowed engineers to get to work immediately to free it, moving its robotic arm and operating the drill repeatedly over several days.

Engineers initially tried to remove the rock by vibrating the drill, to no avail. On April 29, they adjusted the position of the robotic arm and tried vibration again, but only managed to knock some sand off the rock. On May 1, the team gave it another try by tilting the drill more, rotating and vibrating it, and spinning the drill bit. The team expected to have to repeat these operations several times, but instead the rock broke loose on the first attempt, shattering into a multitude of pieces when it hit the Martian soil.

NASA’s Curiosity rover was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and landed on Mars in August 2012 with the purpose of looking for evidence that the Red Planet might have once had conditions that could support microbial life. In 2020, it conducted an experiment in the Glen Torridon region within Gale Crater, an area rich in clay minerals that strongly indicate the presence of water in the past and that it collected using onboard instruments known as Sample Analysis on Mars.

This story originally appeared in WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.

There is a massive and clear opportunity for the telecom industry to capture the next wave of growth from artificial intelligence (AI-)driven services to private 5G and the internet of things (IoT), enabled by new capabilities. However, despite confidence in the industry that it can provide compelling AI and 5G use cases, most communication service providers (CSPs) are yet to begin implementing the capabilities required to deliver it.

That is according to Ericsson’s Breaking the cycle of missed opportunities global study, which was based on the opinion of 455 senior telecom executives and looked at how AI-driven applications place new demands on network performance and flexibility.

Ericsson noted that over recent decades, telecoms leaders have repeatedly identified promising new growth opportunities, only to fall short of turning that promise into sustained commercial impact. It stressed that value has been left on the table “again and again”, with others managing to react faster.

The research set out to explore a simple but critical question: is the industry genuinely better positioned to succeed this time? Encouragingly, the findings show that change is underway, with some CSPs already delivering tangible benefits, addressing long-standing challenges by investing in AI and automation technologies, exploring more agile ecosystems, and adopting cloud-native architectures.

The study showed that growth is no longer defined by a single use case or market but by a diverse mix of region-specific, sector-led and application-driven opportunities. Many of these demand greater speed, flexibility and collaboration than traditional operating models were designed to support.

The study found five key dynamics: there is no shortage of opportunity ahead; execution will determine who captures those opportunities; the industry has a clear view of where it has fallen short before; many of the capabilities needed to unlock future growth remain under-implemented; and closing the gap with industry front-runners will require simpler, more flexible deployment models.

Telecoms leaders were confident about future growth and clear on where opportunities lie. What remains less certain is whether existing operating models and capabilities are ready to support those ambitions at the pace and scale required.

Respondents showed strong alignment on both the opportunities telecoms failed to capitalise on and the reasons why. Legacy systems, slow decision-making, inconsistent investment and limited collaboration featured prominently. AI-driven operations, advanced 5G capabilities, cloud-native architectures and SaaS-based platforms were seen as essential enablers of future opportunity. Yet the uneven availability of capabilities such as 5G Standalone was limiting how developers and technology providers design new products.

The majority (90%) of companies were confident in their organisation’s ability to unlock new revenue opportunities. It also highlighted how the industry was clearly aligned on where the opportunity lies, namely: private 5G and enterprise connectivity ranks as the top growth area (49%); consumer/enterprise digital services with tailored performance (44%); and wide-area IoT connectivity (40%).

However, the research findings also cast a light on the fact that the deployment of several key enabling technologies is lagging behind the industry’s ambitions. As many as around 70% have not commenced implementation of the technologies they identify as critical to achieving that growth, with more than 80% saying future growth depends on scaling services rapidly and that the ability to experiment more easily would be a major advantage.

Two-thirds of companies have not commenced implementation of AI-driven network operations and 61% have not commenced implementation of advanced 5G capabilities, including 5G standalone and network slicing. Some 68% have not commenced adoption of SaaS-based IT platforms.

Concluding, Ericsson warned that a gap between belief and execution remains persistent and that history shows that this gap has repeatedly shaped outcomes for the telecoms sector.

It emphasised that the real challenge – and where leadership must now focus their efforts – is translating that vision into action at pace and scale. Legacy systems, ingrained behaviours and rigid operating models have often slowed progress, allowing others to move faster and capture value – and CSPs must not let the past repeat itself.

“The opportunity ahead for the telecom industry to capture the next wave of growth is clear, from AI-driven services to private 5G and IoT enabled by new capabilities,” said Razvan Teslaru, head of strategy, cloud software and services at Ericsson.

“While there is no single path to capturing that opportunity, CSPs are aligned in the capabilities required to deliver it. The challenge is that adoption of those capabilities remains limited, and this execution gap will ultimately determine who translates ambition into real growth. This will require more flexible approaches, with technology partners and new ecosystems enabling operators to move faster and unlock value.”