Airtel Africa partners with Starlink to bring Direct-to-Cell satellite connectivity to its customers
By using Starlink’s direct-to-cell satellites, Airtel Africa plans to extend mobile coverage beyond cell towers, giving 174 million users access to texts and data even in hard-to-reach areas.
The problem with connecting Africa is that building cell towers in remote areas costs significantly more than urban deployments, sometimes double or triple. A single tower can cost around $150,000 to build and maintain, and still serve only a few hundred people. For telecom operators working in sparsely populated regions, the infrastructure cost per customer makes profitability nearly impossible.
Now, Airtel Africa and SpaceX are flipping that equation. Instead of expanding coverage tower by tower, Airtel will tap into SpaceX’s existing orbital network of more than 650 satellites already in space. Starting in 2026, Airtel’s 174 million customers across 14 African markets will be able to send texts and access data even when they're far beyond the reach of the nearest cell tower. The economics work because the cost of infrastructure is spread across a global satellite network rather than localized, high-cost ground builds.
There’s no special equipment required. No new subscription. Just a regular LTE smartphone that automatically connects to Starlink’s direct-to-cell satellites when terrestrial coverage drops. For users, the experience mirrors a normal mobile network. The only difference is that the infrastructure sits in orbit.
Emmanuel Oyedeji
The scale of Africa’s connectivity gap makes this partnership especially significant. According to GSMA Intelligence, 960 million people in Africa, about 64% of the population, aren't using mobile internet despite living in areas where coverage technically exists.
That’s the usage gap, driven largely by affordability and digital literacy. But an even harder problem sits underneath it. Nearly half of the 400 million people worldwide who lack any mobile broadband coverage at all live in Sub-Saharan Africa. That’s the coverage gap, where traditional network expansion simply does not make financial sense.
Satellite connectivity targets this second problem directly by removing geography from the equation. For a rural health worker accessing patient records or a farmer checking real-time commodity prices, the difference between no connectivity and reliable connectivity is not incremental. It's transformative. When a user moves out of terrestrial coverage in an Airtel market, their phone connects to a satellite instead, without any action required.
Kelechi Edeh
The initial rollout in 2026 will support text messaging and select data services. Future phases are expected to deliver speeds up to 20 times faster as next-generation satellites come online, making video calls, streaming, and AI-powered applications viable. Ukraine’s Kyivstar has already proven the model works, launching the service for its 24 million subscribers in November. Airtel’s footprint is far larger, with 174 million customers spread across Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and nine other markets.
Strategically, the partnership also signals how the satellite connectivity race is evolving. Rather than allowing SpaceX to enter African markets as a direct-to-consumer service, Airtel positioned itself as the local gateway. That move immediately raises pressure on competitors like MTN and Orange to secure similar partnerships or risk losing customers to Airtel’s expanded coverage. Airtel’s existing licenses across 14 markets also smooth a regulatory path that would otherwise slow direct satellite entry.
"Airtel Africa remains committed to delivering a great experience to our customers by improving access to reliable and contiguous mobile connectivity solutions," said Sunil Taldar, Airtel Africa's MD and CEO. "Starlink's Direct-to-Cell technology complements the terrestrial infrastructure and even reaches areas where deploying terrestrial network solutions is challenging."
If deployments like this become the norm, Africa’s connectivity gap will not close through decades of tower construction. It will close through infrastructure that no longer depends on where people live, but on networks already orbiting above them.
Oluwaseun Bamisile
