Even as Africa’s digital economy continues to grow, 62% of the population is still offline according to the ITU. In Africa, 57% of the urban population was online in 2024, compared with only 23 percent in rural areas, a gap that is significantly larger than urban vs. rural figures globally. These disparities mean the need to expand high capacity, resilient, and inclusive communications networks across the continent has never been more urgent.
Today, much of Africa continues to struggle with limited or non-existent high-capacity terrestrial infrastructure:
- Insufficient backbone networks: In many countries, fibre optic networks are concentrated around capital cities, with vast rural areas left underserved.
- Strained legacy systems: Existing infrastructure, such as copper networks, is unable to meet the surging demand for cloud services, video, IoT, and high-volume data traffic.
- Overreliance on vulnerable subsea cables: Recent outages affecting key submarine cables, including SEACOM in May 2024, have shown how fragile Africa’s digital backbone can be when redundancy is lacking.
- Slow and inefficient terrestrial connectivity: African terrestrial connectivity routing often sends network traffic through Europe or the Americas before returning to Africa, introducing latency that can disrupt applications such as ERP systems or cloud services.
- Dependency for backbone access: Many landlocked African nations must rely on neighboring coastal countries to access international fibre networks. This reliance on third-party transit routes can pose sovereignty risks, especially during regional conflicts or diplomatic tensions, potentially disrupting critical connectivity and national digital resilience.
Together, these infrastructure limitations can impact data sovereignty, slow economic growth and innovation, and impede efforts to expand essential services in education, healthcare, and public safety.
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite networks are key to overcoming these limitations.
The LEO satellite opportunity for Africa
Unlike traditional geostationary satellites or terrestrial-only networks, LEO satellite networks offer a unique combination of coverage, capacity, and cost-effectiveness. Their value proposition is tremendous in unserved or underserved areas where building out terrestrial fibre is geographically impractical, cost-prohibitive, or both.
The capabilities of LEO networks align well with the themes of this year’s Africa Tech Festival: Responsible Innovation, Inclusive Investment, Connectivity for Development, and Policy Harmonization. Viewed through that lens, here are ways next-gen LEO satellite networks can help Africa move forward.
Responsible innovation: Smarter, more resilient networks
Next-generation LEO networks like Telesat Lightspeed are designed with cutting-edge technologies that deliver extremely high performance, security, and reliability:
- Space-based data processing: Reduces latency and optimizes routing in-orbit for the most reliable data path between any two points on Earth.
- Optical inter-satellite links: Create a resilient mesh network in space, providing millions of potential paths through the network.
- Phased array satellite antennas: Provide dynamic beam steering, adjusting coverage and capacity as needed to serve population centres or emerging demand zones.
- Security-first architecture: A Zero-Trust Architecture that aligns with globally recognized security standards is applied across all network elements, and end-to-end data encryption is controlled by the user.
- Ground station redundancy: Each satellite can simultaneously connect to multiple landing stations, ensuring data is always reliably delivered. And landing stations have multiple gateway antennas, each with multiple satellites in view.
Inclusive investment: Affordable access for all network operators
One of the primary barriers to extending connectivity across Africa is the high cost of terrestrial deployments. Offering LEO connectivity to solve this challenge requires more than technology – it requires a partner who collaborates with local telecom network operators and governments to help them achieve their goals in an accessible way.
This is Telesat’s approach. Telesat Lightspeed enables affordable access for all network operators by providing:
- A cost-effective alternative to fibre deployments: Fibre-class performance is available to any operator without the need for costly terrestrial infrastructure investments. Operators have a MEF 3.0 Carrier Ethernet network in space that seamlessly extends the reach of their terrestrial deployments.
- Flexible service plans: Subscription-based plans can start with as little as a single, pre-configured point-to-point service, while capacity pool offerings allow service providers to configure and manage connectivity based on user demand and economic conditions.
This approach makes it feasible for both large national carriers and rural ISPs to expand their footprints and serve previously unreachable communities.
Connectivity for development: Reaching underserved regions
By offering high-throughput connectivity across remote and rural areas throughout Africa, LEO satellites are uniquely suited to address connectivity challenges that hamper development. They can support:
- Mobile backhaul in rural and semi-urban areas, making it cost-effective to extend cellular coverage into economically underserved regions.
- Enterprise connectivity for agriculture, mining, energy, and logistics—industries that often operate in remote environments.
- Disaster response and crisis communications, ensuring service continuity during fibre cuts, outages or emergencies.
- Accelerate revenue generation to areas identified for future fibre extensions with temporarily LEO backhaul.
Reaching underserved regions is another example where partnerships between satellite operators and telecom operators are vital. A recent partnership between Orange and Telesat aims to deliver resilient connectivity solutions through an advanced, fully integrated space and terrestrial infrastructure to areas that have historically been underserved.
Policy harmonization: Enabling cross-border collaboration and integration
Africa’s digital transformation requires regulatory coordination and standards-based integration. Because next-generation LEO networks such as Telesat Lightspeed adhere to MEF 3.0 Carrier Ethernet standards, they enable seamless interoperability with terrestrial networks.
This interoperability empowers regional operators to extend their reach across borders without complex integration or proprietary systems. Seamless integration enables expanded delivery of innovative new services, opens new markets, and can create a compounding positive effect, providing a competitive advantage to service providers who collaborate. This can ultimately lead to a more unified and efficient digital infrastructure across the continent.
Looking ahead: LEO satellites as a foundation for Africa’s digital future
The transformative potential of satellite connectivity in Africa is increasingly recognized. The connectivity options offered by next-generation LEO satellite networks align well with the announced priorities for driving Africa’s connectivity infrastructure forward. LEO provides the low latency and high data rates of fibre, but in a far more accessible way. This can unlock the potential of digital transformation and next-generation applications like AI and edge computing in more areas of Africa.
As leaders gather in Cape Town for Africa Tech Festival 2025, the conversation around network modernization must include LEO satellites as not only a complementary technology but a core infrastructure layer. Telesat is committed to helping African telecom operators, service providers, and governments transform connectivity to meet the demand for resilient, inclusive, and scalable broadband continent-wide.
