All 46 African countries to get Starlink before South Africa

Since beginning operations on the continent in 2023, Starlink has been launched in 20 African countries and is planned to launch in another 26 countries by the end of 2026.

However, it is yet to finalise negotiations about launching in South Africa, with concerns about the country’s BEE ownership laws remaining an obstacle.

As a result, South Africa is quickly becoming an island with respect to Starlink connectivity, with almost all its neighbours having the service.

Starlink is a satellite broadband service run by Elon Musk’s private space company, SpaceX. It is supported by a network of over 6,750 low-earth orbit satellites, which SpaceX has been launching in batches since 2019.

Starlink first launched its operations in Africa at the beginning of 2023, when Nigeria became the first country on the continent to be granted access to the low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite technology.

Since then, the service has become Nigeria’s second-biggest Internet service provider (ISP), according to the BBC.

Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Benin, Rwanda, Kenya, and South African neighbour state Eswatini all received access to Starlink services that year.

This increased Starlink’s footprint to 8 African countries by the end of 2023. Starlink’s rollout then picked up in 2024, launching in ten more African countries that year.

These included Mozambique, South Sudan, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Madagascar, Reunion, Mayotte, Cape Verde, Ghana, and Zimbabwe, bringing the total to 18.

So far, Niger and Liberia are the only African countries to launch Starlink in 2025.

Most countries cited Internet affordability and access as reasons for granting Starlink access to operate within their borders.

For instance, only 1.36 million people had access to the Internet in South Sudan in January 2024, according to a DataReportal report from January 2024.

This was one of the lowest Internet penetration rates in the world at just 12.1%. Similarly, only 35.5% of the population had an active cellular connection in early 2024.

This presents an excellent use case for satellite connectivity, which is also why Somalia, a country currently disrupted by civil war, recently granted Starlink an operating license.

The service is ideal for areas with little to no network infrastructure and those ridden by conflict, as it relies on the LEO satellites to connect to a portable terminal on the ground.

“This initiative aligns with our vision to deliver affordable and accessible internet services to all Somalis, regardless of where they live,” said Somalia’s technology minister, Mohamed Adam Moalim Ali.

Starlink has also been used in Ukraine to provide soldiers with connectivity. The table below shows where and when Starlink has been launched in Africa.

Starlink’s struggle in South Africa

Lesotho was the most recent African country to allow Starlink to operate within its borders after Niger and Somalia made similar announcements earlier in the year.

This leaves South Africa, Mauritius, and Angola as the only countries in Southern Africa that have not granted the SpaceX-owned company permission to operate in their territories.

South Africa was previously one of the first countries on Starlink’s list of planned rollouts, with pre-orders for the service launching locally in February 2021.

However, in March 2021, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) issued new regulations to change ownership equity laws for telecommunications companies in South Africa.

These new regulations stipulated that it was no longer sufficient for national network operators and service providers to be 30% owned by historically disadvantaged groups (HDGs).

HDGs include black people, youth, women, and people with disabilities, with some groups needing South African citizenship to qualify.

Icasa’s new regulations would make this stricter, forcing telecommunications providers with a national footprint to be 30% black-owned.

Although the new regulations were passed, the black-ownership requirement was suspended. However, Icasa could put them into operation at any time, creating a huge amount of uncertainty in the market.

In April 2021, Icasa told MyBroadband that Starlink will have to comply with the black ownership requirement. That was when SpaceX started delaying the Starlink launch date in South Africa.

Six months after the regulations were published, around November 2021, Starlink pushed back its planned launch in South Africa to 2023.

Nearly a year later, in September 2022, it was changed to “unknown”, where it has remained until today.

While Starlink has put its local launch plans on ice, Internet infrastructure in South Africa remains an important part of its Sub-Saharan rollouts.

In a recent development, MyBroadband found that Starlink was listed among the peering entities on NAPAfrica’s website, and that it had added a 200Gbps port at the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX).

NAPAfrica is a vendor-neutral Internet exchange with several locations across Teraco Data Centres and is South Africa’s largest Internet exchange.

INX-ZA, a division of the Internet Service Providers’ Association of South Africa, operates community-run Internet exchange points in Johannesburg (JINX), Cape Town (CINX) and Durban (DINX).