No Free Lunch - What Impact is Satellite Connectivity Having in Africa
This Episode of No Free Lunch Features Wesley van Rayne from Redline Networks, and looks at the rapid rise of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity and what it means for Africa.
In this episode of No Free Lunch, host Greg Stewart looks at the rapid rise of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite connectivity and what it means for Africa. Headlines in South Africa focus on SpaceX's Starlink and its licensing disputes. Greg's guest, Wesley van Rayne, is product and solutions lead at Red Vine Networks. He offers something different: vendor-neutral telemetry from the company's SD-WAN deployments across the continent. They cover adoption, network performance, economic and political implications, whether the technology is mature, and data security.
Watch the Discussion Here:
Main Discussion Points
"Connectivity across Africa, the growth in connectivity has always been accompanied by growth in GDP. It just opens up markets, opens up opportunity for people to trade, for people to do business." - Greg Stewart
Red Vine's data and the 70% growth.
Wesley explains that Red Vine, nine years old, began as an SD-WAN provider. It has collected telemetry on fiber, LTE and now LEO links. The Starlink controversy, and news that Amazon's LEO service is coming to South Africa early next year, prompted the team to analyse Starlink usage. They found roughly 70% growth in adoption. Greg asks about the base. Wesley says it is hundreds of nodes across the SADC region, East Africa and West Africa. South Africa and Namibia are excluded because Starlink isn't available there.
Performance and resilience.
Adding LEO links gives the SD-WAN more options for load balancing and traffic steering. Packet-loss-sensitive traffic can be kept on fiber. Wesley says the satellite links can be less reliable themselves, yet the sites that add them see their overall uptime improve. Greg asks about weather. Wesley says he can't speak to it as he isn't a satellite specialist, but he wants to correlate weather data with the uptime figures.
Economics and competition.
Greg raises remote operations such as mines and farms, where fiber is expensive. Wesley says consumers benefit in the short term. Enterprise ISPs struggle, though, because they can't match the pricing of global-volume consumer links. His advice to them is to sell bundled solutions rather than just links. In the medium term he sees pricing pressure. In the long term he asks who benefits when money flows to a global giant.
The political debate.
Greg calls the argument against foreign providers weak. He compares it to Google and Meta, which extract revenue from every country yet aren't banned. He notes that connectivity growth in Africa has historically tracked GDP growth. For him the real question is how Africa can benefit. He suggests that politicians protecting telecom interests may be driving the resistance.
Has LEO arrived?
Wesley says yes. Some sites would be offline without satellite, and those that are connected perform comparably to fixed-line sites.
Security and data sovereignty.
Using a road-and-cars analogy, Wesley says Red Vine handles the transport layer. It encrypts traffic and uses policies to control where it enters and exits, so a LEO link is just another last-mile link. He adds that AI is creating bursty upload traffic, which makes inspecting the payload increasingly important.
