Equinix’s MainOne has acquired capacity on Google’s Equiano subsea cable.

“We are thrilled to announce that we have added an additional layer of redundancy to our network through the Equiano submarine cable,” the operator said in a recent LinkedIn post.

MainOne added that fortifying its network will help its customers ensure business continuity amidst network disruptions. In March last year, four cables in West Africa - MainOne, SAT-3, ACE, and WACS - were damaged by an undersea landslide off the coast of West Africa.

It is not known how much extra capacity the cable will provide.

Oluwasayo Oshadami, director of solutions architects at MainOne, Solutions by Equinix, said: “Our customers can remain focused on the core of their business operations, not on the intricacies of managing multiple networks, fail-overs or resilience. With the integration of Equiano, we are simplifying and eliminating the stress of managing multiple cable connections for our end users. Hence, we give them the peace of mind they deserve.”

Equinix acquired MainOne in 2021 as its West Africa unit. In October last year, Equinix announced it would rebrand the unit to bring it under the Equinix name. The company has been headed up by Wole Abu since its founder Funke Opeke stepped into a strategic advisory role in November last year.

MainOne operates five data centers across West Africa in the Ivory Coast (x2), Ghana, and Nigeria (x2). Its second Ivory Coast facility launched at the end of 2023 on the outskirts of Abidjan. Its first Ivory Coast facility is a prefab module, offering capacity for 100 racks.

Google’s 15,000km Equiano cable lands in Namibia, Nigeria, Portugal, Saint Helena, South Africa, and Togo, and was launched in September 2022.

In June last year, Telecom Namibia also secured capacity on the cable in light of the West African cable outages.