Why Africa’s telcos are embracing Starlink instead of fighting it

Until January 2023, when Starlink launched in Nigeria—its first African market—the continent’s telecom industry operated on a simple assumption: connectivity had to be built from the ground up. Mobile operators have spent decades investing billions of dollars in towers, fibre networks, spectrum licences, and, more recently, data centres to connect millions of people across Africa. The farther a community was from existing infrastructure, the more expensive and difficult it became to serve.