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By Victoria Fakiya from Techpoint
Lagos, Nigeria: Africa’s telecom battle is slowly moving from cell towers to space. Just days after Uganda gave Starlink a provisional operating licence, Airtel Uganda confirmed it has already started testing Starlink’s Direct-to-Cell satellite service.
The technology allows ordinary 4G smartphones to connect directly to low-earth-orbit satellites without relying on nearby towers, fibre cables, or even Starlink dishes.
Airtel Uganda CEO Soumendra Sahu described the trials as the beginning of testing “highly advanced technology” designed to improve smartphone connectivity in places traditional networks struggle to reach.
The tests follow the same model Airtel and SpaceX quietly rolled out in Kenya earlier this year. There, regular smartphones connected directly to Starlink’s satellite network in areas with zero terrestrial mobile coverage, supporting services like WhatsApp calls, Facebook Messenger, maps, and Airtel financial transactions.
Airtel Africa CEO Sunil Taldar has already claimed the system could deliver speeds up to 20 times faster than older satellite-to-mobile technology. Uganda is now the second African country where the tests are happening live, and Airtel clearly wants this to become much bigger across its 14 African markets.
What makes this shift so important is that it completely changes the economics of connectivity in rural Africa. Building telecom towers in remote regions is extremely expensive, often costing hundreds of thousands of dollars while serving relatively small populations.
Airtel’s direct-to-cell approach basically removes the need for those towers entirely. Your phone itself becomes the satellite terminal. That puts Airtel and Starlink on a very different path from companies like Safaricom, which are mostly using satellites to strengthen remote towers rather than bypassing infrastructure altogether. One model upgrades the old telecom system. The other threatens to replace parts of it entirely.
The bigger picture is that Africa’s telecom industry is now turning into a satellite arms race. Airtel is partnering with Starlink. Vodacom is testing satellite connectivity with Amazon’s Project Kuiper and AST SpaceMobile.
MTN is experimenting with multiple satellite providers, including OneWeb and Lynk Global. Everyone is chasing the same opportunity: hundreds of millions of Africans who still lack reliable Internet access.
The market for satellite mobile services is projected to explode over the next few years, and Africa is quickly becoming one of the most important battlegrounds. Uganda’s tests may look small today, but they are part of a much larger fight over who controls the continent’s next generation of connectivity
