Starlink’s impressive performance in South Africa

Starlink’s network performance in South Africa has improved substantially in the past two and and a half years, according to an analysis by MyBroadband Insights.

Although not officially available locally, many people have been using the SpaceX-operated satellite Internet service’s roaming plans to access the Internet in rural areas nationwide.

These packages are intended for Starlink customers residing in countries where the service has launched and who want to use their kit when they travel to other countries.

These include countries where Starlink is already available and plans to roll out, even in cases where an estimated launch date is unknown, like in South Africa.

While Starlink only officially launched its roaming options in March 2023, some lucky users had started receiving emails to test out its roaming service in unsupported countries a few weeks earlier.

MyBroadband’s Speed Test website and Android app started picking up Starlink speed tests in January 2023, albeit in very limited numbers.

The average download and upload speeds across six tests were 16.5Mbps and 1.5Mbps, respectively, while the latency was 366.33ms.

However, when users tested with the Starlink app’s built-in speed testing tool, they recorded much higher speeds.

In MyBroadband’s own early tests in May 2023, we measured download speeds over 150Mbps and upload speeds around 60Mbps using Starlink’s built-in speed test feature.

The highest we could achieve with MyBroadband’s speed test platform was 82.23Mbps, while the lowest ping was 166ms.

The differences were likely due to MyBroadband’s speed test servers being located in South Africa, where Starlink had no nearby ground stations.

Nevertheless, by mid-2023, Starlink download speeds on MyBroadband’s website and Android app had improved to around 40Mbps, while upload speeds were close to 3Mbps, and latency was around 200ms.

At that point, the number of Starlink speed tests on MyBroadband had increased to nearly 200 per month.

However, by the end of 2024, performance had degraded, with download speeds hovering around the mid-20Mbps, uploads below 2Mbps, and latency back around 300ms.

That deterioration could be attributed to the unprecedented uptake of Starlink in Sub-Saharan African countries like Zimbabwe and Kenya, which would also affect South African users.

The high demand resulted in Starlink speeds dropping into the single digits in cities like Harare, forcing Starlink to suspend orders in these areas temporarily.

Starlink too popular for its own good

The service was never intended for mass adoption in highly populated areas, but its pricing and performance offers better value than many competing uncapped fixed and mobile services in Africa.

To help its network recover, Starlink also suspended new sign-ups to its roaming service in African countries and started implementing a 60-day continuous roaming use rule.

The service quality has bounced back impressively in the first half of 2025, potentially because Starlink has expanded ground station capacity and the number of satellites.

Starlink’s satellites above the region no longer need to relay data signals between each other to reach a ground station several thousands of kilometres away to tap into the Internet.

In January 2025, average download speeds were 26.51Mbps, upload speeds were 2.35Mbps, and latency was still around 300ms.

At that point, Africa’s only Starlink ground station was near Lagos in Nigeria.

The second ground station came online in Nairobi, Kenya, in mid-January.

The following month, South Africa’s average download speeds had increased to 55.65Mbps and uploads to 4.68Mbps. Latency was also slashed by nearly half to around 164ms.

Starlink rolled out another ground station in Mozambique towards the end of March 2023 and added points-of-presence at the NAPAfrica and Johannesburg Internet Exchanges in April 2025.

The 293 speed tests done on MyBroadband’s platform by mid-May 2025 recorded an average download speed of 71.93Mbps, upload speed of 10.25Mbps, and latency of 77.7ms.

The table and graph below summarise the Starlink network’s performance across nearly 9,700 speed tests in several key months since its roaming service started to be used in South Africa.

Data collected by Wikus Steyn. Words by Hanno Labuschagne