Amazon's Project Kuiper just received a seven-year licence from the Nigerian Communications Commission to operate a constellation of over 3,000 low-orbit satellites above Nigeria. Starlink is already live in the country. That means two competing global satellite networks are now cleared to serve Africa's largest market and its 240 million people. For a continent where only 36 percent of people were online in 2025, against a global average of 74 percent, this is a genuinely significant moment.
The gap those satellites are trying to close is stark. Fewer than one in a hundred Africans has a fixed broadband connection, compared to around eighteen per hundred globally. Fibre reaches only about 30 percent of the population within ten kilometres of a node. Mobile infrastructure covers more ground, but only around four in ten Africans actually use the internet today. The economics of extending cables and towers to rural and remote communities simply do not work, and they are not going to start working this decade.
Low earth orbit satellites are the most credible answer to that reality. They orbit close enough to deliver latency in the tens of milliseconds, comparable to a fixed line and far more usable than the 600-millisecond lag typical of older geostationary satellites. Africa's LEO market is already valued at roughly 5.9 billion dollars and projected to nearly double to 11.4 billion by 2032. The Nigeria decision is commercial confirmation of what those forecasts have been pointing to for years.
But a 25-year-old technical rule is sitting quietly in the path of all this. Article 22 of the ITU Radio Regulations contains Equivalent Power Flux Density limits, caps on how much power a LEO constellation can transmit in frequencies shared with geostationary satellites. The rules were written to prevent interference between different types of satellite systems at a time when today's large-scale constellations were not foreseen. The assumptions baked into those limits no longer reflect the scale or the mitigation capabilities of the systems now being licensed and launched.
The licences are real, the investment is arriving, and the technology works. Whether the people who need it most actually get connected may come down to a regulatory clause written before most of them owned a mobile phone.
Originally published by African Business.