South African organisations have learned to treat unreliable infrastructure as a fixed parameter, particularly when it comes to connectivity. As a result, many businesses have had to site operations where fibre or reliable wireless already exists, because last-mile build-out to remote mines, farms, or border areas is often slow, high-risk, and vulnerable to theft or vandalism. Mines, farms, organisations and distributed industrial sites have had to lean on a mix of microwave, LTE and patchy fibre, accepting higher latency and occasional blind spots as the cost of doing business. This lack and complexity has had a knock-on impact across digital transformation as companies have had to prioritise use cases that can tolerate drop-offs over those that depend on uninterrupted video, real-time analytics or tight automation loops. In short, the South African company has designed for degraded reality.
This is now being disrupted and the technology driving that disruption is orbiting roughly 1,200 kilometres above the earth. Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have crossed a performance threshold that most enterprise decision-makers have not yet fully registered. Across African markets, providers such as Starlink and OneWeb are already delivering median download speeds in the 45-106Mbps range with latencies typically between 25 and 70 milliseconds. This is a performance that is increasingly rivalling that of terrestrial broadband and it has very little resemblance to the 500-800 millisecond delays associated with legacy GEO services. As operators deploy local points of presence and ground infrastructure within African countries, traffic increasingly remains on the continent rather than hairpinning via European gateways, further reducing latency for cloud and real-time applications.
