New Starlink ground station goes live in Kenya, should massively reduce latency for African users

One area where Starlink internet lags behind the competition is latency. By competition I don’t mean other satellite internet services but rather fibre and mobile broadband.

Latency is the time it takes for data to travel from one point to another.

It’s a rather unfair fight. When using Starlink, your dish communicates with a satellite which is hundreds of kilometres above the ground and then the satellite talks to a station on the ground that is connected to the actual internet.

Once it gets there, it then goes to the actual thing you wanted, e.g. a YouTube video stored on some computer somewhere (CDN).

When using mobile data, your phone communicates with the base station which is just hundreds of meters away. Once it gets there, we are already talking about physical connections by fibre and it’s on to the internet.

Starlink can help reduce latency by increasing the number of satellites in orbit but that only goes so far. The other way is to increase the number of physical places on the ground that the satellites communicate with.

Ground stations

Like I said, the satellites have to communicate with a physical place on the ground that is connected to the internet. If there was only one such place on earth, a satellite which is over Zimbabwe would get your query to view a YouTube video and relay it via other satellites until it got to the satellite directly over the ground station.

The ground station which is connected to the internet then actually gets the data. However, that whole relay process takes time, which would mean terrible latency.

Imagine if the satellite directly above you could then directly communicate with a ground station close to you. It would be quicker.

Up until very recently, there was only one such ground station in Africa, called a Point of Presence (POP). It was in Nigeria, which is thousands of kilometres from here.

Starlink introduced a new POP in Kenya and it went live mere days ago. This should reduce latency for users in Africa in a major way.

Many users were getting latency between 120 and 150 milliseconds but some are now reporting consistently getting speeds in the 30 milliseconds range. If you use the service, you can let alone know what you’re getting.

Starlink’s latency map still says Zimbabwe is in the 107 to 155ms range. We shall see how that changes now that Nairobi POP is now live.

Starlink doesn’t disclose how many POPs it has but some researchers say it had 33 active POPs around the world before the Kenya one went live. Most of them are in North America where most subscribers are.