Big development for Starlink in South Africa

SpaceX’s Starlink broadband service has started peering at South Africa’s largest Internet exchange — NAPAfrica.

MyBroadband first looked into this development after a Reddit user posted that Starlink had added a 200Gbps port at the Johannesburg Internet Exchange (JINX).

“Starlink Johannesburg point-of-presence (PoP) is active on the ground and connected to Lagos and Nairobi PoP but missing ground stations and local users,” Redditor Panuvic posted.

We subsequently found that SpaceX Starlink was listed among the peering entities on NAPAfrica’s website. NAPAfrica is a vendor-neutral Internet exchange with several locations across Teraco Data Centres.

While it is entirely separate from JINX, the two exchanges both peer out of data centres in Johannesburg.

A search of PeeringDB confirmed that SpaceX Starlink was also peering at JINX.

By setting up at NAPAfrica and JINX, Starlink has connected its network to other Internet service providers (ISPs), content delivery networks (CDNs), and cloud service providers who peer at the facility.

The direct flow of Internet traffic between these networks bypasses the need for a third-party transit provider.

For peering companies, this cuts down on the costs of data transit through long-distance terrestrial and submarine fibre network cable systems.

For Starlink Internet users in South Africa and neighbouring countries, the major benefit will be lower latency and general connection improvements when accessing many popular online services.

As Starlink relies on satellites to provide connectivity to its subscribers, it must have a ground station near the exchange point for optimal performance.

While its satellites can communicate with a Starlink user terminal far away from any fixed networks, they are useless if they cannot connect to online content and services, which are hosted out of data centres.

Starlink can still function in areas without ground stations — including countries without significant data centre infrastructure.

It does this by using inter-satellite laser links, which can bounce signals to a satellite that is within range of a ground station.

While latency via these links reduces as Starlink’s fleet grows, it is still far off from the latencies achievable with ground-based optic fibre links.

Ground station near South African border

Although Starlink has obtained type approval for three Earth Gateway stations in South Africa, it has yet to apply for an electronic communications network services (ECNS) licence.

SpaceX is unable to do so because it does not meet the country’s ownership rules for telecom licensees.

The Electronic Communications Act stipulates that licensees must be 30% owned by historically disadvantaged groups.

A new provision introduced by the Independent Communication Authority of South Africa could change this requirement to 30% black-owned.

While Starlink’s approval is in limbo in South Africa, four of our six neighbours — Botswana, Eswatini, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe — have launched the service.

Lesotho recently also approved a licence for the service, while Starlink expects to launch in Namibia this year. In South Africa, the services’ estimated launch date has been “unknown” since late 2022.

At least one South African neighbour either already has an Earth station or will have one in the near future.

Zambian Starlink kit supplier Stellar Systems shared photos of a ground station under construction in Matola, the biggest suburb of the Mozambican capital, Maputo.

This area is less than 100km away from South Africa’s border.

While the ground station’s status remains to be confirmed, it appears as though it is already operational.

Numerous people in South Africa who are using a roaming workaround to access the service have reported much-reduced latency compared to when the nearest ground stations were in Kenya and Nigeria.

One user posted a screenshot of a speed test in Limpopo with a ping of 40ms. On that same test, the download and upload speeds were 336Mbps and 33Mbps, respectively.

The Starlink map also showed an average latency of 32ms to 77ms in Mozambique, compared with 44ms to 125ms in February 2025. Eswatini users had an even lower average ping of 26ms to 65ms.

The slightly lower ping in that country might be due to the fact that its furthest point is closer to the Mozambique ground station.

NAPAfrica is the closest large-scale Internet exchange to the ground station, which makes it the ideal choice for improving Starlink’s performance in Southern Africa and adjacent areas.

Users have also reported their connections are being assigned with South African IP addresses, where they previously had IPs from foreign countries.

That means that their connections are “breaking out” to the Internet via South Africa.

The maps below compare Starlink latency in various African countries in February 2025 and April 2025. The lighter shading on the Southern African countries indicates reduced latency.