Zambia is the newest in a growing list of African countries to have SpaceX-owned Starlink go live, with the deployment status for South Africa still stuck on “unknown” on the Starlink website.

Starlink, which supplies low-Earth orbit satellite-based internet services, rolled out its services in Zambia on Monday through Paratus Group, a telecommunications specialist with operations across Southern Africa.

Paratus Zambia will handle distribution of the high-speed broadband internet solution on behalf of Starlink.

“It is a very exciting opportunity for us to be involved in this initiative. We recognise and applaud the hard work done by our government, regulator and other authorities, in conjunction with Starlink, in ensuring this leading-edge technology is available to the Zambian market,” said Paratus Zambia president Marius van Vuuren in a statement.

According to the Starlink website, the service costs the equivalent of R709/month with a once-off hardware fee of R9 885. The service has no contracts or data caps as well as a 30-day trial period. Customers are promised typical download speeds of 120Mbit/s and, although the Starlink website mentions a two-week lead time, Paratus said it has stocked up on hardware to speed up deployment to newly registered customers.

Read: Zimbabwe is set to get Starlink before South Africa

“We have our own stock on-site here in Lusaka and this means we will be able to deliver and provide an installation service and technical support expeditiously,” Van Vuuren said.

“As a business-focused service, we are aware that customers probably also have ‘behind the router’ services such as connecting their office LAN and wireless access points… We are also able to incorporate these [services] into the Starlink service… We also offer SD-WAN services in conjunction with our Starlink offering,” he said. — (c) 2023 NewsCentral Media