An African telco’s guide to satelite internet

This week on African infosec

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CybAfrique Media
March 14, 2026

CybAfriqué is a space for news and analysis on cyber, data, and information security on the African continent.

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An African telco’s guide to satelite internet

Last week, Kenya’s Communications Authority (CA) announced it would investigate Airtel Kenya and Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell (D2C) partnership to determine whether Starlink’s use of terrestrial spectrum could interfere with existing 3G/4G/5G signals on local towers. This is the first time an African regulator has examined such an arrangement, but the partnership itself is not unprecedented. In 2023, Vodafone and Vodacom announced plans to use Amazon’s Project Kuiper to extend 4G/5G connectivity. Airtel also signed a major deal signed in late 2025 to roll out Direct-to-Cell services across its 14 African markets, including Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda. MTN partnered with Starlink to provide D2C services to remote areas in Zambia. Axian and AST in Tanzania, Madagascar, and Senegal. Safaricom and AST SpaceMobile. Orange and Starlink in West Africa. It’s everywhere

We have written before that this is a classic case of “join them if you cannot beat them,” and that still holds. Satellite internet poses a growing threat to telco-based ISPs. If you would like to understand how, please read that edition here. This edition explains how these "satellite to cell” partnerships actually work.

Before 2001, much of the developing world accessed the internet primarily through satellite links. Your phone sends a signal to the nearest mast, many of which were equipped to communicate directly with satellites. Communicating directly with satellites was both expensive and slow. At some point, someone figured you could instead equip masts to talk with each other and have them all converge instead before being sent out.

Right around this time, submarine cables also started growing. SAT 3 made landfall in West Africa in 2001. Fibre cables are a much cheaper, faster, and more consistent means of sending data. It was not a hard sell. Instead of satellite, most ISPs moved their services to fibre cables. The story is far more complex than this, and people do take first and second degrees to fully understand what it takes, but at some point, most of the world’s internet stopped being transferred via satellite and started going through tiny underwater glass wire thingies.

Satellite internet, the one these “direct to cell” partnerships are about, is a bit different from what it was decades ago. First, satellites back then were much farther and tracked, required far more energy to transmit, and were susceptible to disruptions like rain or electromagnetic interference. Low-orbit satellites, the kind Starlink uses, are more decentralized and down to earth. They also operate on wavelengths that, although not as reliable as a fiber connection, are much more consistent than their predecessors.

These partnerships work in two ways. One, much like before, your friendly neighborhood telco providers will have masts connected to these low-orbit satellites and act as a relay between your cellphone and the satellite. This is what exists in most places, but it doesn’t make a lot of business sense. If direct to cell is meant to fix the digital divide, then how MTN, which has not had the money to fix masts in the rural areas it wants Starlink to fix, can afford money to fix masts in those same places just to connect with Starlink and have to share the ensuing revenue. It could as well use that same money to build its own mast, served by its preexisting ITX, and keep all the revenue to itself. Why run a glorified hotspot terminal instead? The reason they do this anyway is the second way these partnerships are more likely to play out.

There are radio wave bandwidths, and if you decide to get on one of those bandwidths today, you’d need to get some licensing or authorization from the authorities of whichever country you will be transmitting in. Starlink has authorization for some of that, but not the specific one that lets the satellite communicate directly with your phone. In fact, in most places, regulations and licenses have not caught up with the possibility of this situation yet, which is exactly why regulators in Kenya might be a bit antsy about it. As you can guess by now. MTN and your friendly neighborhood telco have that license, and Starlink has the infrastructure. The rest could be history.

Except that the older generation of low-orbit satellites can’t really communicate directly to the cell at maximum efficiency, yet. In fact, Starlink is just launching a new generation of satellites equipped with this tech and has just 650 of these satellites in orbit. Although competitions such as AST SpaceMobile have made the tech much more available. 

It also means that at some point, satellite providers could decide to remove their middlemen and just offer direct-to-cell to individual consumers. In the world of e-SIMS, it wouldn’t even need to sell SIM cards. And it has tried to do this. In Kazakhstan and Ukraine, it began testing WhatsApp calls and SMS services directly from satellites to standard 4G phones. This will eventually be decided by which makes better business sense.

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