Starlink roaming in South Africa from R1,260 per month

More than 30 countries offer uncapped Starlink roaming subscriptions that South Africans can use to access the cutting-edge satellite Internet service locally for less than R1,500 per month.

South Africa has excellent Internet infrastructure that compares well globally, but many households and businesses in rural areas still lack affordable, uncapped solutions.

Fibre Internet has expanded rapidly in recent years, but is concentrated in the middle-income areas of more densely populated areas like cities and towns.

Therefore, people in smaller towns and lower-income neighbourhoods rely on mobile Internet services as their primary type of broadband connection.

Unfortunately, mobile operators generally cannot offer affordable uncapped services without throttling consumption, as it would overload their radio access networks.

It also does not make financial or operational sense for them to build expensive towers and supporting infrastructure in deeply remote areas, where most people live on farms and in small informal settlements.

Satellite Internet services address the need for broadband connectivity in areas where terrestrial infrastructure is not viable.

Starlink stands apart in this space as a low-Earth orbit (LEO) operator with over 7,000 satellites in its fleet rather than a handful of geosynchronous (GEO) satellites.

In addition to orbiting at a much lower altitude, LEO satellites have far greater capacity than GEO satellites.

Starlink speed tests in Southern Africa show the service’s download speeds regularly exceed 200Mbps, upload speeds are between 20Mbps and 30Mbps, and latency is under 100ms.

Speeds are also not throttled outside highly populated areas.

Conventional GEO services for residential use typically only go up to 50Mbps download speeds and 10Mbps uploads, with latencies over 700ms.

For the best possible packages, GEO users can expect to pay well over R2,000 per month. In addition, speeds are severely throttled after a few hundred gigabytes of data is consumed.

In African countries where Starlink is available, the service offers incredible value for money. In Zimbabwe, a Starlink uncapped subscription starts at $30 (R537) per month.

Starlink roaming works in South Africa — most of the time

While not officially available locally, Starlink’s more expensive Roam Unlimited service works in South Africa for those who can procure kits from countries where the service has launched.

However, a restriction to this is that Starlink implements a 60-day continuous use rule, which requires that the service be paused for two days every two months to continue working.

That is unless the user is able to take their kit back to the country of registration every 60 days.

The kits must also be activated in the country where you want to register the service, so simply shipping them to a local address without taking them out of the box is not advised.

Furthermore, the country’s telecommunications regulator, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa, considers distributing or using Starlink locally illegal.

However, there have been no confirmed reports so far of Icasa confiscating, fining, or arresting people for using the service.

MyBroadband analysed Starlink prices around the world to see which countries had the most affordable Roam Unlimited prices.

We found around three dozen with monthly pricing of around R1,500 or less, which is lower than the cost of roaming in most African countries where many early local users have their subscriptions registered.

The most affordable country for Roam Unlimited is Paraguay, which has a monthly subscription of 560,000 guaraní, converting to roughly R1,260 at the time of publication.

Paraguay is not a prime tourist destination for South Africans, so it may not be likely that many locals will be able to use that option.

However, 20 European countries charge €72 for the roaming subscription, which works out to about R1,461.

These include most of the larger countries in the region — including — Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain.

The table below shows the prices of Starlink kits and subscriptions in countries where its uncapped roaming service costs less than R1,500 per month.