Two satellite internet services launched in South Africa within weeks of each other in July. Herotel began selling Amazon's Leo network under the brand evry. Meanwhile, Deputy President Paul Mashatile launched BrainSAT, built with Space42, an aerospace technology company based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Neither is Starlink - the satellite constellation operated by SpaceX, the firm of ex-South African entrepreneur Elon Musk.

The three networks sit at very different heights above the Earth. Starlink runs on roughly 10 400 satellites in low orbit, 340 to 570 kilometres up. Amazon's Leo constellation behind evry sits higher, between 590 and 630 kilometres, with 396 satellites in orbit as of July 2026. BrainSAT relies on a single satellite in geostationary orbit, 35 786 kilometres up — in a different and much more archaic category altogether from the other two (which likely helps to explain why it is the government’s chosen delivery vehicle).

How South Africans Get Online

Most South Africans reach the internet through a mobile connection, not a fixed line. The country counted 51.7 million internet users in October 2025, a penetration rate of 79.6% of the population, alongside 127 million active cellular subscriber identity module (SIM) mobile connections, as many people carry more than one SIM.

Fibre is growing fast off a small base. Fixed broadband, driven mainly by fibre, expanded 19.3% in 2025, and networks such as Vumatel, Openserve, Frogfoot, Octotel, and MetroFibre (all South African fibre network operators) now collectively connect more than four million homes. Fibre-to-the-home coverage has passed one in five urban homes, with subscriptions growing more than 30% a year. Outside urban areas, long-term evolution (LTE) and fixed wireless still carry most of the load.

Speeds are respectable but not spectacular. South Africa's median mobile download speed sat at 65.7 megabits per second (Mbps) in the last quarter of 2025, good for 64th place in the global rankings of Ookla, a global network testing company.

Fixed broadband runs at roughly 63.8Mbps download against 58.6Mbps on mobile, though fixed pulls well ahead on upload, at around 51.0Mbps against 12.0Mbps for mobile.

Latency (how long it takes data to travel over a connection) on both broadband and mobile is low, typically 20–50 milliseconds. That matters for what follows: any satellite service entering this market must beat connections that already work reasonably well where they exist.

What Evry Brings

Herotel's satellite product is not really Herotel's technology. It belongs to Amazon, whose Leo network, formerly Project Kuiper, had 396 satellites in orbit as of July 2026, working toward a licensed cluster of 3 236. Amazon has already missed one deadline to expand that network. Commercial service in South Africa is not expected before 2027.

Herotel’s offers to households are modest by satellite standards: a Nano tier up to 100Mbps, and a Pro tier up to 300Mbps. Pricing has not yet been released.

The deal works because of who Herotel is as much as what Amazon builds. Vumatel bought full control of Herotel in a deal the Competition Tribunal cleared in December 2025 and the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) approved in May 2026.

Vumatel belongs to Maziv, which is controlled by Community Investment Ventures Holdings, and which is in turn controlled by Remgro, which is Johann Rupert's investment vehicle, already the dominant force in South African fibre through Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa.

Herotel already holds the ICASA licences a foreign satellite operator would otherwise have to win from scratch. Amazon gets a fast, compliant route to market. Herotel gets Amazon's satellites.

What BrainSAT Brings

BrainSAT launched on 1 July 2026, with Deputy President Paul Mashatile presiding and the UAE's Space42 as technical partner. The deal traces back to a memorandum of understanding signed during a visit to Dubai by Mashatile in April 2024.

BrainSAT's core product is YahClick, a satellite broadband delivered from geostationary orbit, 35 786 kilometres above the Earth. Vox Telecoms and other resellers have sold the same YahClick service in South Africa for years under different branding. BrainSAT repackages an existing product with a government launch event and a UAE state-linked partner.

Distance is the problem. A signal travelling 35 000km and back takes far longer than one bouncing off a satellite a few hundred kilometres up. YahClick's latency runs to roughly 700 milliseconds, more than 15 times worse than the fixed and mobile broadband described above, and worse again than either low-orbit alternative. BrainSAT also sells Thuraya satellite phones, aimed mainly at remote and commercial users rather than ordinary households.

Why Starlink Would Be Real Competition for Both

Starlink is not for sale in South Africa. ICASA requires satellite operators to hold an Individual Electronic Communications Service licence, an Individual Electronic Communications Network Service licence, and one or more radio frequency spectrum licences before selling to the public, and SpaceX holds none of these.

The obstacle is the same 30% local black ownership rule that Herotel's structure and BrainSAT's local partner both exist to satisfy, as SpaceX has refused to sell equity in its network to a local partner. Starlink has instead proposed meeting the requirement through an Equity Equivalent Investment Programme, a recognised broad-based black economic empowerment (B-BBEE) mechanism that substitutes local investment for equity. In May 2026, ICASA said it cannot approve that route without Parliament first amending the Electronic Communications Act, and as of last month it has received no formal licence application from SpaceX at all.

What stands out here is that South African regulators value compliance and BEE above the actual technological standing of the firms in question.

Starlink’s intrinsic advantages can be read in the fact that it already operates in more than 100 countries, including Southern African countries, such as Lesotho, Mozambique, Eswatini, Botswana, and Zambia.

Starlink itself claims median download speeds approaching 200Mbps by late 2025; independent Ookla measurement puts the real figure closer to 105–130Mbps, still comfortably ahead of the broadband South Africans use today, and evry's Nano and BrainSAT's YahClick. evry's Pro tier, which is not yet available anywhere, claims 300Mbps. Starlink’s latency sits at roughly 25–40 milliseconds, closer to home fibre than to satellite.

To summarise the offers, BrainSAT seems like a non-starter offering a product far behind what is already widely available from existing mobile and fibre providers. evry’s Nano tier will offer a product that achieves roughly twice the speed of existing averages while its Pro tier offers speeds that could be between four and five times faster than existing averages. Starlink would offer something in the middle ground between evry’s Nano and Pro tiers.

From a straightforward internet provision perspective, to an ordinary person its much of a muchness between evry and Starlink. But the issue is much more complex than just that, because pricing is yet to be brought into the equation. As the number of fibre providers increased, the price came down accordingly. The same should apply to satellite internet providers in South Africa, but for the time being the requisite competition that would be much to the benefit of consumers is being stymied by regulators and their licencing rules.