The Scene
By the time Starlink, the satellite internet provider owned by billionaire Elon Musk’s Space X, bumped up its monthly subscription prices in Nigeria by nearly 50% last week, most observers had been expecting the hike.
Nigeria’s regulators blocked Starlink’s first attempt to double its fee in late 2024 but this time the rise seemed inevitable. It comes after a 50% tariff hike by rival telcos in January. Starlink’s turn had simply been delayed.
At $35 a month, Starlink ranks among Nigeria’s most expensive internet service providers. The hardware also costs around $250. Despite its premium pricing, the satellite internet service has found traction: reporting around 65,000 users in Nigeria, 19,000 in Kenya, and a growing footprint across Africa. This has led to some optimistic headlines about Starlink’s traction in Africa.
But here’s the twist: Starlink may not be trying to dominate any single African market. It’s aggregating small, high-value pockets across the continent. That strategy might not upend African connectivity overnight, but it could be good enough to build a profitable niche, and that might be all Starlink needs. It feels easy to dismiss 60,000 here and 19,000 there as no real dominance, given that Africa’s mobile telcos serve millions of internet customers.
Starlink’s promise of fast, uncapped internet almost anywhere resonates with Africa’s remote workers and upper middle class. Yet cracks are showing. Performance dips have surfaced in cities as more users sign on. Satellite capacity is finite, and congestion leads to degraded service.
Some users, like Lagos-based software engineer Busayo Akanni, describe the service as inconsistent. “There are too many downtimes for Starlink to be my only daily driver,” she says. “I use it, but I also have backup.”
Know More
Starlink is now operational in 18 African countries, including Malawi, Niger, and Sierra Leone. A recent ProPublica report shows it is also lobbying to enter The Gambia, a country with fewer than 3 million people. The satellite company’s global user base currently sits at 4.6 million. Adding one million African users across, say, 30 to 40 countries, would be meaningful without requiring deep national penetration.
A map of current coverage reveals the playbook: build a thin but continent-wide user base of early adopters, remote workers, oil and gas outposts, and government contracts. Musk’s new influence within the US government means that the company can also tap soft power to make progress in countries like South Africa and Cameroon, where regulators have been blocking its launch.
Starlink did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
The View From South Africa
All eyes will be on South Africa and President Cyril Ramaphosa this week as he meets with US President Donald Trump and other American officials in Washington. But even before the first handshake, reports claim South African officials have discussed how Starlink might bypass the country’s Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) laws, regulations that have barred its launch since 2023 — an approach first reported by Semafor in February.
If Starlink is allowed to launch in South Africa, it could send a powerful signal across the continent. Most African telecom operators don’t have a head of state to negotiate on their behalf. But if South Africa, long seen as one of the tougher markets to crack, begins to bend its rules under diplomatic pressure, it shows just how far the US government is willing to go to support Starlink’s expansion. That could be a game changer for regulators elsewhere, shifting how they weigh compliance, competition, and geopolitics in a suddenly satellite-friendly era.
Some critics have accused Ramaphosa of bending to foreign pressure and argue that any special deal for Starlink would amount to trading regulatory sovereignty for tech diplomacy.
Step Back
Starlink doesn’t have the pricing power or local penetration to compete with mobile telcos head-on. But by stitching together niche markets across dozens of countries, it can achieve reach and profitability without ever becoming dominant.
Despite this, Starlink has spooked local telcos. “We propose that the CA [Communication Authority] instead consider mandating that satellite service providers to only operate in Kenya subject to such providers establishing an agreement with an existing local licensee,” Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telco, said in a February 2024 letter to the CA. Safaricom also argued that Starlink should be limited to providing infrastructure for telcos.
Airtel Africa, another of the continent’s major telcos, recently showed what such a partnership could look like after announcing a plan last week to use Starlink’s satellite tech to support mobile coverage in remote areas.
“We don’t see Starlink as competitors; we’re all participants in the same ecosystem. Starlink gives customers more options, and each provider will find its segment of the market,” said Gbenga Adebayo, President of the Association of Licensed Telecoms Operators of Nigeria (ALTON).
Olumuyiwa Olowogboyega’s view
If Starlink succeeds in planting a flag in every African country, it may become the first tech company — certainly the first internet provider — to achieve that feat. Mobile telcos, by contrast, pick and choose their markets. MTN and Airtel focus on being the number one or two player in mid-to-large markets, rather than spreading themselves thin. Each market demands regulatory navigation, capital expenditure, and real infrastructure.
Starlink sidesteps all that. With no base stations or towers to build, it can scale by adding coverage zones from space. For governments, this creates a regulatory dilemma. On one hand, Starlink can help close connectivity gaps in rural areas without major public spending. On the other hand, it’s a foreign operator with no in-country data infrastructure and little accountability. In African countries where internet shutdowns are deployed during elections or civil unrest, will Starlink comply if asked to shut off access? So far, we don’t know.
Meanwhile, Starlink is quietly resetting market expectations. Mobile data, not voice, now drives telco revenue. And even if telcos push back publicly, they know what Starlink’s high-value users represent: the same affluent segment they hope to monetize. If Starlink keeps growing, telcos may need to recalibrate their rural and enterprise strategies entirely.
African connectivity has long been framed as a scale game: whoever reaches the most people wins. Starlink is making a different bet: infrastructure-light consistency, distributed across enough countries, might be just as powerful.
Room for Disagreement
Despite its premium pricing, long-time watchers of African telecommunications markets disagree with the notion that Starlink will not be used in low-income, sparsely populated, rural areas. For one thing, they argue that prices will fall over time as more satellites launch and the technology matures. Samuel Ojerinde, an analyst at Nigeria-based Cordros Securities said that satellite broadband will play a vital role in filling coverage gaps in places where laying cables isn’t feasible especially as prices come down over time. “Starlink could be a game changer for rural connectivity,” he told Semafor.
Notable
- While Safaricom is asking its regulator to limit Starlink’s role to infrastructure provider, Airtel Africa is partnering with the satellite ISP to reach remote areas.