Amazon Leo beats SpaceX Starlink to South Africa

Amazon Leo has partnered with Herotel, South Africa's largest ISP, to help connect rural population. Starlink is not available in the country.

Amazon has announced that its satellite internet constellation, Leo, will provide connectivity for South Africa's largest internet service provider (ISP), Herotel. The company said that Leo will help to connect homes and small businesses that are too uneconomical to get connected with fiber and fixed wireless.

Herotel will use Amazon Leo's technology as part of a new service it is offering called Evry. Evry will launch commercially in 2027 to get more residential customers connected to the net. Interestingly, this is the first agreement of this kind for Amazon Leo in Africa.

While internet connectivity is a given for most people in places like the United States and Europe, the situation is different in South Africa. According to 2024 data from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), only 78.4% of individuals are using the internet in South Africa.

Amazon notes this "persistent challenge", saying that millions of people who live on farms, in small towns, and in rural communities, still lack reliable internet access due to distance, terrain, and low population density, which make traditional infrastructure impractical and expensive.

With Amazon Leo, customers can connect to the net via compact antennas and there is no need for fiber or fixed wireless infrastructure at their premises. Amazon Leo satellites orbit the Earth at 590 kilometers above the planet and deliver internet speeds capable of video calls, streaming, remote work, and online learning.

The fact that Amazon Leo is powering this service is good news. Due to the cost of getting satellite constellations into orbit, there are relatively few organizations offering this type of service. The leader of the pack is SpaceX with its Starlink constellation, but others offer similar services, including Eutelsat OneWeb. Notably, Starlink is not available to customers in South Africa yet.

By introducing more competition, theoretically we could see prices come down for these services. In some countries, Starlink can be more than twice as expensive as broadband, so lower prices would be nice.