Starlink opens roaming in Africa again after pause over pricing abuse
The service lets users stay connected while travelling across countries.
After nearly a year on pause, Starlink is quietly reopening its roaming plans in parts of Africa. This is just one of the many recent signs that the company is finally finding its footing on a continent that may have caught it off guard.
Starlink’s “Roam Unlimited” subscription, which lets users stay connected while travelling across countries, is back in places like Lesotho, Mozambique, and Eswatini, all neighbours to South Africa, where the service still isn’t officially available.
This means that users can get a kit registered in one supported country and use it while on the move across others. And in many cases, it even works in places where Starlink hasn’t launched yet, like South Africa, as long as it’s not geoblocked.
But this feature wasn’t always so open. Back in 2024, Starlink started clamping down on users gaming its region-based pricing system. People were picking up cheaper kits in lower-cost countries and using them permanently elsewhere. And with wide pricing gaps, like Lesotho’s unlimited plan at R1,900 versus capped options elsewhere, the arbitrage was hard to ignore.
Techloy
To stop the bleeding, Starlink introduced a 60-day “return home” rule: if you don’t reconnect your kit in its registered country within two months, you get cut off. This move, along with capacity crunches in high-demand cities like Harare, led to a near-complete halt of roaming sign-ups across many African countries.
While roaming stayed off in places like Zimbabwe and Botswana, Starlink took that time to scale up. It launched new ground stations in Nairobi and near Maputo, both in countries where roaming has now resumed. These stations help relieve network congestion and reduce reliance on far-off infrastructure, cutting latency from around 200 ms to under 40 ms in supported regions. That alone makes the service more viable for things like gaming, video calls, and other delay-sensitive applications.
Now, as roaming reopens, it seems Starlink is adjusting its strategy, building as it learns. The rollout isn’t uniform (some countries only get 50GB plans), but it’s a step forward.
Even its competitors are feeling the pressure. Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Starlink’s biggest rival in the low-Earth orbit space race, reportedly turned to SpaceX to launch some of its early satellites. That’s like asking your rival for a ride, and it shows just how far ahead Starlink is in terms of deployment.
All signs point to Starlink inching closer to a broader African footprint. For now, it may be trial-and-error, but that’s still movement, and for underserved regions, even partial access is better than being left in the dark.
Kelechi Edeh
