Starlink Now “Sold Out” In Areas Surrounding Harare

If you haven’t yet ordered Starlink and live in areas surrounding Harare – including Norton, Ruwa, Chitungwiza, Dema, Mazowe, and Nyabira – you may face a lengthy wait before service becomes available. Starlink has recently marked these areas as “Sold Out” on their service availability map.

The capacity problems have expanded in stages:

1. Initially affected only high-density areas in Harare (Mbare, Highfields)
2. Then spread to all of Harare, with status “Expanding Q3 2024”
3. Later changed to “Expanding 2025”
4. Now marked as “Sold Out” in many areas surrounding Harare

What “Sold Out” Status Means

This new “Sold Out” designation appears to be indefinite, marking a significant change from previous status updates. When attempting to sign up in affected areas, users now receive this message:

Starlink Residential is not available in your area. Enter your email below to be notified about future availability and product updates, or if Starlink is active in your market, visit our Roam page to order our mobile offering.

Previously, Starlink would accept deposits from users willing to wait for service. The fact that they’re no longer accepting deposits suggests a more serious capacity constraint.

Affected Locations

Here’s the full list of areas now marked as “Sold Out”:

• Arcturus
• Chitungwiza
• Concession (parts of it)
• Dema
• Epworth
• Glendale (parts)
• Goromonzi
• Harare
• Juru
• Manhenga
• Mazowe
• Melfort
• Norton
• Nyabira
• Ruwa

What to do if you live in these areas

Well, sign up to get Starlink updates, whatever your situation is. If there’s something SpaceX is doing aggressively, it is expansion and improvement of its technologies. You will eventually get service, likely in 2025.

In the meantime you probably want to just get an alternative. Check if Econet’s SmartBiz will work for you. Also check with the Liquid, Utande, TelOne, Telco and the other providers in case they have something for your area.

Should I just get the Roam service?

There’s a way to get Starlink anyway, but we’ll quickly put it out here that we don’t quite recommend it for the average person. You can sign up for an area that still has capacity (like Chinhoyi, Marondera etc…) and get the Roam service which is priced at $100 a month.

This means you can potentially use your Starlink in Harare and anywhere in the region, even outside Zimbabwe. We already knew that roaming subscribers, do not get priority ahead of the people that registered for that area. But that “Sold Out” status is tricky though. It might mean even you will not get service.

William Chui, who works for a company that assists Starlink customers solve their problems commented on this issue today:

The previous hack of putting a service address 5km away has now proved to be difficult as the nearest available cells are as much as 20km away, not allowing it to work. The congestion has reached such an extent that Starlink are unable to offer roaming packages in these congested areas, forcing someone to register their service address elsewhere in Zimbabwe and roaming from there.