Satellite connectivity has been the backbone (pun intended) of Africa’s internet connectivity pretty much since get-go. Satellite bandwidth is, however, expensive, and slow (on older satellites). With every company and its dog having discovered that there actually is a market in Africa, things are changing, and satellites are no longer the mainstay of connectivity on the continent. Companies like SES and O3B are still investing, heavily, in satellites with an African footprint, however. What gives?

Says MTN Business GM of Technology and Infrastructure Edwin Thompson: “Satellite is generally still quite expensive. At one point it was very efficient to use and you will still find a lot of the network operators, especially VANs, using satellite capacity specifically where terrestrial capacity costs were artificially inflated. Then we went through a phase where terrestrial capacity prices started normalising, for example in Kenya, where the cost of internet capacity was slashed to 25 percent of cost by the TEAMS and Seacom cables landing.”