Nigeria’s communications regulator has issued a document that says more about Africa’s digital future than most of the continent’s broadband strategies combined. The Nigerian Communications Commission granted Amazon LEO (formerly Project Kuiper) a seven-year licence, effective from 28 February, to operate a constellation of over 3,000 low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites over the country. Elon Musk’s Starlink is already live in Nigeria, so a second major LEO operator is now cleared to follow. Two competing global satellite networks, licensed in Africa’s largest market, preparing to serve its 240m people; that is no small thing.
But here is what the press release did not say: a 25-year-old technical rule, written before smartphones existed and debated in rooms most African policymakers have never entered, could still determine how much of that investment actually reaches households in Nigeria and across the continent.
Why the gap persists
Africa’s connectivity numbers are not a secret, but they are worth stating plainly because they frame everything that follows. Only 36% of Africans were online in 2025, against a global average of 74%. The 4G mobile phone system covers roughly 70% of the continent’s population, yet only around four in ten Africans actually use the internet. The infrastructure exists in many places. Affordable, usable connectivity does not.
Fixed broadband barely registers: fewer than one in a hundred Africans has a fixed connection, compared with around eighteen per hundred globally. The fibre rollout that anchors digital economies in Europe and Asia reaches few in Africa: only about 30% of its population is within ten kilometres of a fibre node.
The business case for extending fibre and mobile towers to the last 30% – the rural, the remote, the commercially unattractive – does not work under current economics. It is not going to start working this decade. That is not pessimism; it is the investment reality that has produced exactly these numbers over the past two decades of trying.
LEO satellites are the most credible answer to that problem. They orbit close enough to deliver latency comparable to a fixed broadband line – tens of milliseconds, versus the 600 milliseconds typical of traditional geostationary orbit (GSO) satellites – making them genuinely usable for education, healthcare and commerce rather than merely technically present. The LEO market in Africa and the Middle East is projected to be up to $1.3bn by 2033. The Nigeria licensing decision is commercial confirmation of what the forecasts have been saying.
The satellite rule nobody talks about
So, what is the problem? If the technology works, the investment is arriving and regulators are issuing licences, why is there still a catch?
The catch is a provision in Article 22 of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Radio Regulations called Equivalent Power Flux Density limits (EPFD). In plain terms, these are caps on how much power an LEO constellation can transmit in the frequencies it shares with geostationary satellites.
These rules were designed to prevent interference among geostationary and non-geostationary or LEO satellite systems, 30 years ago. These limits were set in an era when today’s LEO constellations were not foreseen. The assumptions they make no longer reflect the scale, distribution, or mitigation capabilities of the systems now being licensed and deployed.
Those limits do not prevent LEO operators from launching satellites. What they do is constrain the capacity, coverage density, and ultimately the quality of service those satellites can deliver in shared frequency bands. In markets where connectivity is already marginal, constrained capacity is not an abstraction. It means fewer schools are connected, fewer clinics are online and fewer small businesses are able to participate in a digital economy.
GSO operators – including those with established satellite infrastructure across the continent – argue these protections remain necessary. They are not wrong that some protection framework is needed. The question is whether limits set in an earlier era of satellite technology should govern today’s deployments without an evidence-based review.
A window that is closing
the 23rd ITU World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC-23) in Dubai in 2023, a push to formally revise these limits failed to achieve consensus. The issue was deferred: an ITU study group was tasked with conducting updated technical studies, with WRC-27 as the next decision point.
WRC-27 takes place in October 2027 in Shanghai, China. Before that, Africa’s collective regulatory position will be formed at the Third African Preparatory Meeting, scheduled for September 2026 in Tunisia. The positions that delegations carry to Tunisia – and from Tunisia to Shanghai – will determine whether Africa uses its substantial ITU voting weight to push for evidence-based modernisation of these rules, or to defend the status quo that leaves Africa lagging all other regions of the world in broadband connectivity.
Africa accounts for a fraction of the global satellite communications market. That, for the continent with the largest unmet connectivity need on earth, is a stark reminder that today’s rules and market structures are not yet delivering what Africa requires.
What needs to happen
African policymakers reviewing their WRC-27 positions before the Tunisia meeting in September should ask one direct question: does this serve the connectivity needs of our populations, or does it protect arrangements that were designed for a different era of satellite technology?
The answer to that question – and the positions Africa’s delegations carry into the conference room in October 2027 – will shape what broadband looks like for hundreds of millions of people this decade. Nigeria has already sent its signal. The preparatory meeting in Tunisia is where Africa’s collective answer takes shape. That is three months away.
Patrick Masambu is a senior advisor at Access Partnership. He previously served as the director general of the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (ITSO) from 2017-2025, where he completed two consecutive four-year terms.