Africans Are Turning to Starlink
economist.com
economist.com
Seems like a bit of a stretch in modern times. Do you have any idea what percentage of traffic is TikTok/YouTube/Facebook?
I talk about computer history. Is my knowledge not valid just because I'm "on youtube" ?
I think that many people appreciate Starlink in rural parts but your story is one of many that are just amazing
There are likely thousands of hardworking people making that ship sail, and it's really short sighted to just write them all off because he is a dumbass.
We are SO ready to judge but so unwilling to THINK. Why?
Thinking risks you forming an opinion that might not align with the zeitgeist.
There was a student newspaper editorial not too long ago... I think maybe it was at Harvard?... the crux of the piece was there's no reason to debate or engage, because we know we are right. Having independent thought risks putting you in a position of staying silent, or publicly disagreeing with people who have this kind of mentality.
You would be hard pressed to find a person who is more responsible or more representative of their organization than that.
I will say having the world ISP run by a man with his ... proclivities is less than optimal.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/starlink-deal-void-on...
AFAIK there has been no replacement contract since it was killed in 2025
I am very happy my tax dollars are not going into his pockets.
It’s not a crusade. You send him your money if you want. It’s none of my business.
Pretty sure they are doing a bunch of AI training with your data now too. Opt-in by default. So yeah, no thanks.
I personally see more value in connecting poor and isolated rural communities. Plus I highly doubt a provincial government contract in Canada will be a major influence on a Elon's dumb twitter politics.
I don't think the decision was meant to influence, rather, it's self-defense against said "Elon's dumb Twitter politics."
Americans having challenges conceptualizing how problematic Starlink is to non-Americans: imagine the same satellite service was provided by Huawei - but helmed by Chinese Elon.
The empirical evidence that your rejoinder is a false equivalence is that the US also expunged Huawei hardware from its telecoms infrastructure.
It's much harder to subvert extractive resources, compared to frequently updated software platforms like 5G switches or internet terminals.
> In early 2002 he met entrepreneur Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to Russia, where they attempted to purchase ICBMs.[8] The decision to found the company SpaceX was made on the flight home, and Griffin briefly considered serving as chief engineer,[9] but eventually he instead became president and COO of In-Q-Tel, a private enterprise funded by the CIA to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests.[10]
I think that a more expensive and crappier version of Starlink is going to be offered to Canadians , looking at how its run as an outsider.
[1] https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/01/16/prime-...
European Tesla sales are rising yoy again. <https://www.statesman.com/business/article/tesla-sales-q2-20...>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
On one hand Elon Musk and JD Vance supported far-right German party AfD, a party with strong links to Russian. On the other hand Starlink helps Ukraine in the fight against Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AfD_pro-Russia_movement
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2025/02/24/germany-...
That said people are somewhat right that in most of Western and Central Europe there isn't a huge need for Starlink, it will be quite niche. But I have not heard any 'vitrol' against Starlink.
These guys get paid outsized rewards for exploiting our/everyone's oceans. Imagine a giant blimp getting paid outsized pay hovering for days over national forests hauling in every last animal they could get until the blimp was overflowing with dead creatures leaving behind a biologically weakened forest. We wouldn't hype them as working hard/dangerous jobs, we'd label them as crappy people/a crap industry. So glad we're making them more comfortable.
As others mentioned, It’s a very similar situation for rural America. My dad lives in a rural setting, and for years could only get slow geostationary satellite Internet. As soon as he got Starlink, his connectivity improved dramatically. Only now that there was an established market for rural internet users in his area, are cable and fiber lines starting to get run.
You didn't read the article:
>Africa’s internet infrastructure is not fit for purpose. During a communications boom in the early 2000s, the continent eschewed fixed-line internet for cheaper mobile broadband; today more than 400m Africans, the bulk of the continent’s users, gain access to the internet this way.
>But the technology has not kept pace with the rapid increase in data demand from streaming and AI-powered applications.
This is in the context of a population that really depends on mobile wireless for market information if they are farmers, and for payments. Having a mobile phone can take priority over having a flush toilet.
Starlink has both opportunities and challenges: 5G is faster and cheaper and more reliable. But mobile wireless revenue is low, so capex is low too. Combine this with a big rural population, and Starlink has a great opportunity, if they can find customers who can afford it.
This is the rub. The primary market here are people whose communities aren't wealthy enough to afford infrastructure that would provide superior service (5G being a step up from satellite, and wired being a step up from that). So Starlink depends on there existing a growing population of people who aren't too poor to afford internet service in the first place, while also relying on the hope that those people don't become too wealthy to afford long-term infrastructure investments.
Village sees increased productivity, raises the wealth of the region, suddenly surrounding villages can afford it. Or, individuals get their own. I don't like giving Musk the benefit of the doubt, but the Chinese/Sears/etc. model of catering to people no one else would try to service can certainly be lucrative.
You certainly can use microwave backhaul links between towers, but the existing solutions don't provide nearly enough capacity to justify the 5G upgrade.
To oversimplify, 4G works in the 1 Gbit world. 5G needs 10-25 Gb.
Satellite internet is not a “generation above” fibre internet
That’s a seperate anecdote about his dad in America.
If you’re going to nitpick irrelevant inconsistencies, at least be right.
However, I actually think that the main "benefit" you get by not having an extensive wired infrastructure is the lack of an incumbent provider. Centralized incumbents can put pressure on any new technology that puts their existing infrastructure investments at risk.
Fiber requires custom engineering at the city block level and a single rotten utility pole can block deployment.
I say this as someone who waited for fiber and is happily using it now.
Once the satellites are linked, I bet that improves.
Same with electricity: there are many rural places in Africa where solar panels + batteries are a revolution.
But then there's a reason why a country with more than 3x the number of people in the US was "missing" technologies: Africa is, overall, very poor (GDP per capita in Africa is something like 1/40th of the GDP per capita in the US: 1/40th!). So there's a limit to how far the jump is possible: as someone commented, most of Africa is still on 3G and it's not clear if StarLink shall be able to find customers rich enough to buy their services.
Of course they will. If the prices are too high they can just lower them to whatever people can afford. It's not that expensive to cover Africa's customers.
Look at it this way - the satellites will be traveling over Africa no matter what. If no one in Africa subscribes, then that's a part of their orbit where they aren't earning any revenue. Assuming the rest of the costs are covered by subscribers in other regions, they can price service in Africa as low as they'd like (above hardware costs).
See medicine, for example
1: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/continent-size-comparison/no...
EDIT: I can't read, sorry all!
And that’s the 99th percentile answer on that side of the bell curve
When people want to refer to a country on that continent, they do. There is little reason to refer to most countries on that continent because they are basically not separate administrative districts
Just fiefdoms that have nothing to do with the borders drawn and lots of area in between
And the ways its being addressed domestically involve cross border supernational unions and economic blocs hoping to get the basic infrastructure of a single market, single defense framework
essentially the ground work to becoming exactly what everyone keeps saying
what are you talking about?
I suspect this is important for two reasons..
First, because yes, it's magnitudes cheaper if you don't have to build and install the infrastructure.
Second, because now you're no longer dependent on your "local provider" which is likely to expect and deal in bribes, share info with local leaders, and generally be a potential risk to everything you want to do.
So, needless to say, starlink has been amazing.
The difference in latency is massive. 3ms vs 220ms roundtrip time at the speed of light.
The DSL would go down for hours a couple of times per month. I got on an early starlink pilot program and had a dish up in early 2021. Aside from momentary blips on the leading edge of a stormfront and occasional network issues a couple of times per year, it’s been rock solid with half the latency and 20x the bandwidth.
>Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: I don't have broadband at home [2012]
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/us-news-blog/2012/may...
A satellite will serve thousands of customers, whereas a fixed line only serves one. I think 10k is also severely understating the cost per customer. There's like hundreds of metres between these houses at a minimum, and in some areas possibly Kilometers from house to house.
Apart from being SDR's, Starlink and its newer competition use phased array antennas. So they can provide extra capacity to denser areas.
I don't know if we're still talking Africa or in general, but $10k doesn't get you anywhere near 20 km around me. I got municipal fiber recently, and our agency passes through the costs. On a 7 drop project of about 1 mile, aerial on existing poles, my share was $5k; plus I had to pay my own way to get conduit installed from the pole to my house, that was nearly $7k. Underground utilities are expensive!
Now everything costs more and they'd rather build AI DC's
So for someone living in rural america, it's really "famous last 300 miles".
You can't steer the antenna back and forth for every exchange between station and customer. What the steering may get you is increasing the coverage of an area currently underserved by the constellation, and maybe a slight increase in diameter of ground covered due to the geometry, at the cost of lower signal strength.
>And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station.
Did they finally implement satellite-to-satellite links? Fine, if that actually works, they can indeed extend the range much further. I don't know if I believe it, though.
Even ignoring that they have multiple arrays, they use separate antennas to talk to the base stations on a different frequency band.
Also, lookup the number of ISLs in orbit. Starlink has been providing coverage for the middle of the ocean for years now. They have provided coverage to Pacific Islands that have lost their undersea cable connections.
You can read this article. The lasers worked before February 2022, but you don't require them to have multiple spot beams.
“if that actually works”??? It has been working successfully for large parts of the Earth for years.
Not many people live inside 15 miles of those stations, but Starlink is active in 23 countries.
South Africa has a POP but no ground station.
You are very out of date on your knowledge here. When it first launched yes, Starlink sats purely acted as "bent pipes" so you needed a ground station within 300-400 miles or so. But inter-sat optical laser links went online quite awhile ago so now data can go from a terminal through the orbital network to ground across the planet. That of course was required for them to offer air/maritime global service (as well as extremely remote areas like polar), can't put a ground station in the middle of the ocean.
Incidentally that should allow them to beat the latency of standard fiber by quite a bit over a long enough distance, there was speculation it might become quite popular for HFT for example, but I haven't tried it.
Edit: So I went ahead and checked, and interestingly at least via a v1 land based terminal on a basic plan they don't make use of it. So must be a higher end option or something? Picking a random top 50 site in Japan tbs.co.jp (163.45.254.1), a streaming TV site iirc, I got around 186ms ping on a fiber connection in rural New England, and 192ms via Starlink, almost exactly the difference one would expect for adding purely a LEO leg up to the nearest ground station. Maybe they want to charge for that, or maybe they're still fleshing out bandwidth on the intersat network. If anyone has a maritime or portable terminal or something it'd be interesting to see some comparisons. In principle on a great circle the distance for me should be something like 10600km, so maybe 12000ish including sats, 24k rtt, which at the speed of light should be more like 80ms. Even with some routing lag that's a big enough difference seems like it'd be noticeable if it was going via orbital mesh instead of ground and kind of fun to test.
I'd have thought they'd sell a different product with lower latency over Ku band by now
I can bring it on long hikes, and be sure ill have internet access if i need it. completely changes the risk profile of remote outdoors activity
Rescues even with EPIRB’s can still be difficult.
Does it make you absolutely 100% safe? No. Does it suddenly nullify any potential risky scenario? No. But it is pretty idiotic to say that it doesn't change the risk. It very clearly changes the risk and reduces it drastically.
Things can go very wrong very quickly. If you go do risky activities far from help you should be prepared and know what you are getting yourself into and how to get yourself back out of it ahead of time.
a major part of outdoors risk is the uncertainty, which by definition, you cant look up ahead of time
If you're going somewhere where there is a chance you might get lost, injured or trapped by weather, and need rescue, you should already be bringing something like a Garmin inReach. That's a highly ruggedized device with a battery that lasts for over a week without recharge, is small enough to keep in a pocket, provides two-way messaging and weather reports, can track your position at regular intervals so your family can see where you are, and can, without any setup and even when you're seriously injured, be used to directly send out an SOS with automatic reporting of your position and two-way voice communication.
As excellent as Starlink is, it is nowhere near a substitute for those capabilities. And the inReach has existed for longer than Starlink, ergo Starlink doesn't change the risk profile. The only real argument that Starlink changes the risk profile is if you're comparing Starlink vs nothing, or Starlink + PLB vs just PLB. And sure, in those cases Starlink is a significant improvement, but it's still inferior to something like an inReach.
The second part of the argument is that having better connectivity is no substitute for fundamentals, which is overwhelmingly, obviously correct. Yes, bring all the connectivity you want, the more the better if you're willing to carry it. But your plan shouldn't be built around the assumption that you can be rescued if things go wrong. If you get complacent due to having better connectivity it's entirely possible for it to worsen, rather than improve, your risk profile.
Right now I am in an overlanding vehicle, but I'm not an expert in offroading. I drove down a 5 mile trail that was very technical. The car can handle it, but it needs caution and the way back is much harder. I was extremely hesitant about going back up that way. If I get stuck, I am solo and I am hours from town via driving. So I just pulled out starlink, and with a combination of claude, off roading websites, and google maps, found an easier, roundabout, and more off the grid way back.
At every step I can use available information to put myself onto safer routes, I can research every decision before I make it. Where is the safest place to sleep, etc.
Pre internet people are out there just winging it in the back country
I’m all for expanding internet coverage, but people have a false sense of security because they have signal bars on their phone.
Self-rescue, and self-sufficiency are priority, not some sense that someone will come save you if things go wrong.
There’s enough to go from building any type of housing to building your own steel forge. It’s amazing.
No one says car crashes are less risky because you can dial an ambulance.
Unfortunately Starlink will never be able to make substantial inroads into urban areas since their cell size is far too large to serve a high of density customers well.
Having competition is important, and Starlink, being what it is, can compete with everyone everywhere at all times.
Starlink is a natural fit for sparsely populated underserved rural areas. But if going with Starlink begins to make economic sense in city centers, local ISPs have failed very hard. And Starlink is always there to punish them for it.
Where you have internet it does not work while the local power is out. And it was not that stable and at times we were sitting 10 hours without power a day. And that's in Joburg. And 5g was hard to come by.
So I can only imagine that locals are happy to see such a thing. Especially if you can run it from a car charger or something.
Remember the US backlash against Huawaie over 5G towers?
African nations should have the exact same sovereignty/national security concerns regarding US tech, specially given the well documented history of the NSA and CIA leveraging their digital platforms for intelligence/spying
It's actually funny how the discourse is never the same when it come to US interests vs sovereign nations
The law isn’t about foreign/doneatic. It’s about black/white.
Increasingly this state authorised racism is now extending to black people. The violent ethnic cleansing against black Milawians by black South Africans is terrifying.
Just like the violent ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and Jordanians by white Israelis is terrifying
Separately, kneecapping starlink does a lot for our country by preventing a man who hates us from abusing our laws and spying on our citizens.
This is the problem of looking at intent in law. Plenty of racist law had the intent to improve the country. But is in fact often economically illiterate for helping the populace.
The law's intent was never to be racist, and while outcomes vary, the effect does not actually harm white south africans on average. So both the intent and the effect is non-racist.
But the law criticized had nothing to do with hate or spying, so really you've done something sly and shifted the posts once we called bullshit as an out for a clearly illiterate policy.
Additionally, the owner of Starlink hates South Africa (I never said black south africans, but you know), because he has spread lies about genocide occurring here.
2) You are rebutting a straw man. I said individual blacks deciding on starlink for themselves, not supposed collective decision of some against others via (corrupt) "representatives", precisely because I knew you'd try such deception of arguing a representative means an individual black person who wants internet must agree with it.
3) Representatives != public opinion. Most people can't be single issue voters. See also, medical marijuana was illegal in US during long periods of supermajorities disagreeing with their reps on the issue.
4) "only foreign people like you seem to have a problem with it." LMAO, LMFAO even, there are other SA posters (and Musk) here with a problem with the circumstances, its not a foreigner conspiracy. You can't fool us this easily coming in telling us youre the South African here and you'll tell us its only foreigners when it's South Africans who disagreed with the situation from which many of us first found out about this.
5) "because he has spread lies about genocide occurring here." Curious to see what specifically this refers to. I did see him advocating against promoting genocide through songs calling for the genocidal act of killing of the Boer, which has been chanted in some stadiums and political rallies.
You accuse me of deception for arguing that, in a democracy, the law must be written by averages and not by a few individuals who want starlink. Ok.
I'm only addressing those points because you're showing some signals of bad faith conversation and general meanness so I don't want to respond to anything until I know you are good faith.
You will be shocked to discover that most ethic cleansings were among people who looked similar. And that include nazism in Europe which did not divided world into black and white either. It includes arab world and hostilities there too.
Like, for christ sake, you could have used the names of those ethnic groups.
There are really no shortcuts to the immense goal of covering the African continent with reliable internet.
https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/BNI-disco...
In any case, the fiber situation in Ghana was dicy for a time because theives were cutting the fiber lines in hopes they were copper. Thieves are often in a hurry so they cut first, check, then move on.
EDIT: In order to improve their lives, they need internet, but they also need everything else. Not providing everything in lockstep fails hugely. (And this includes providing good governance and non-corrupt leader, a problem we have no idea how to solve.)
You can call it religion, you can call it culture, you can call it fear of choppy choppy of the hand, or maybe the fact everyone and their brother has a full auto AK, but there's something on a whole other level happening with poor (and also rich thieves) people in much of Africa.
tldr; Starlink doesn't work in South Africa, Elon's home country, because the ANC and its lawfare arm ICASA demands they hand over 30% to the State because of BEE laws.
I've bought a mini and standard, and on my mini I've got maybe a couple of good anecdotes in it. But the rest of it? The 97%? Pure fucking hustle to work. A crying sham of a service. I cannot rely on this thing to save my life for a single zoom call at work.
It's also why Starlink has pushed so aggressively to establish itself in South Africa, going as far as to hold private meetings with the Democratic Alliance and even spamming their customers with emails urging them to put pressure on the government.
That's just nonsense. The regulator has been very clear on what the hold up is. A ECNS license is needed, which in turn requires 30% black ownership which musky boy isn't willing to do and isn't likely to change his mind on given his stance on DEI.
That's why the communication minister tried to create an alternative pathway around the 30% requirement
https://www.businessday.co.za/companies/2025-12-12-starlink-...
What an absurd requirement.
Of course, another goal is just to empower previously disenfranchised groups and contribute to the economy of South Africa.
Furthermore this arrangement does not contribute to the economy of SA. It just makes Starlink services more expensive for SA consumers. The reseller is not really doing anything to develop an industry, but rather taking a skim. If the government actually wanted to develop the economy they would just let Starlink in for any real entrepreneur to use the internet access in remote areas to potentially expand business services into areas that previously lacked communication.
You are just wrong, the law says the local partner must be economically productive, and starlink is allowed to choose them, so if they don't contribute to starlink's business, that is starlink's fault. This is now the second time I have told you this, so you are wilfully misunderstanding me. Conversation over.
Of SpaceX or of a special South African Starlink reseller that SpaceX owns 70% of?