Good news for Starlink users in South Africa

While South Africans still have no official way of signing up for Starlink, existing roaming users in the country have recently received a major upgrade to their service.

The boost in performance is due to the SpaceX-owned satellite Internet service’s launch of a terrestrial ground station in Nairobi, Kenya, towards the end of January 2025.

Previously, the only ground station on the continent was located in Lagos, Nigeria.

Starlink’s network includes many satellites that can transmit data packets directly to each other using laser beams.

That means it does not have to provide a terrestrial ground station within each individual satellite’s coverage area to provide Internet connectivity.

Starlink’s satellites “bounce” transmissions off each other, creating a link between a customer’s dish and a ground station located far away, when necessary.

However, this path increases the distance over which a signal needs to travel and the “stops” it needs to take in the Internet communication process.

The time it takes for a data packet to travel back and forth is referred to as latency or ping and is measured in milliseconds (ms).

Nairobi is about 2,900km from Johannesburg as the crow flies, compared with the 4,500km distance to Lagos.

South African roaming users have reported latencies of around 50ms in their Starlink speed tests after the ground station went live.

Previously, latencies between 200ms and 300ms were considered to be typical for the service, although, on some exceptional occasions, the ping could drop to around 100ms.

The reduction will improve the performance of latency-sensitive applications like video calling and competitive online gaming on Starlink for South African users.

The additional ground station is also good news for users in several other Southern African countries located closer to the new ground station.

According to Starlink’s official latency map, users in Kenya itself are recording latencies between 23ms and 35ms, which is comparable to fixed-LTE.

The map below shows Starlink’s latency in African countries. The 44ms to 125ms highlighted is for Mozambique.

Starlink still “illegal” in South Africa

It should be emphasised that the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) has not yet approved Starlink and regards its local use as “illegal”.

Accessing Starlink in South Africa requires importing a kit registered with its home address in an officially supported country and a subscription to a roaming plan, which is more expensive than the regular one-country subscription.

Aside from the legal issues associated with the service, local users must deal with some significant practical hurdles.

The biggest issue is that Starlink imposes a 60-day continuous use limit on roaming to stop people from abusing the different prices in each country to pay less than the price SpaceX set for their location.

The Starlink kits used in South Africa are typically registered in officially-supported countries like Botswana, Eswatini, Mozambique, Malawi, or Zimbabwe.

To continue using the service beyond 60 days, customers must access it for at least several hours in the kit’s home country.

For those unable to do so themselves, unofficial importer IcasaSePush offers a reactivation service where it physically takes kits to Eswatini to reset their roaming days counter.

Another workaround that some customers use is deactivating the service for two or three days every 60 days. That resets the counter of consumed roaming days.

Starlink also suspended new regional roaming subscriptions in Africa in October 2024, shortly after customers started reporting degraded service in populous areas.

It is suspected that Starlink underestimated demand for its service or is struggling to launch enough new capacity to keep up with demand.

New Starlink orders remain unavailable in several capital cities in officially supported African countries — including Abuja, Bulawayo, Harare, Lagos, Lusaka, and Nairobi.

The addition of a new ground station could potentially help address capacity issues if the problem was that too much traffic needed to be directed to the Nigerian substation.

However, it is also possible that the capacity problem is due to an insufficient number of satellites operating over Africa.