Satellite internet in Africa is often the only connectivity that reaches a mine site, gas field or exploration camp, because fibre stops at the cities and cellular stops at the last tower. A GEO Ka band or Ku band link carries steady operational traffic, C band survives tropical rain, and LEO adds low latency for interactive work.
Plenty of the producing sites we support end up running two of those paths at once. Here is why, and what catches people out once the dish is bolted down.
Why fibre and cellular fail at these sites
Distance is the first problem. National backbone in most African countries runs along the coast and up two or three corridors toward the capital. A copper operation in the Katanga region or a gas field inland from the Niger Delta can sit 150 km to 400 km from the nearest carrier point of presence, and nobody is building that last stretch for a single customer.
Then there is the arithmetic. On builds we have been quoted against, fibre has landed somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 US dollars per kilometre depending on terrain and how much of the route has to be trenched. Two hundred kilometres to one mine is therefore a capital project of roughly 3 to 8 million US dollars, with a permitting tail measured in years, for an asset whose mine life may be shorter than the payback.
Even where a route exists, it breaks. Road widening, agricultural clearing and cable theft take out spans constantly, and on an unprotected route every cut is a full outage until a splice crew drives out. Restoration inside six hours counts as a good day, and five days in the rainy season would surprise nobody. Cellular is worse for a fixed industrial site: the tower covering your camp is often on a generator with its own fuel theft problem, and its backhaul is frequently a microwave hop that saturates by mid morning.
Which satellite band works where in Africa?
Coverage over the continent is good now but uneven, and the band you choose is mostly a rain decision. High throughput Ka band payloads deliver the cheapest megabits, C band delivers the megabits that keep arriving during a storm, and Ku band sits between them, carrying a large share of African mining and energy traffic. Before any of that matters, check which beams reach the site.
| Band | Typical antenna inland | Rain behaviour | Round trip latency | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C band | 2.4 m to 3.8 m | Barely affected | 550 ms to 650 ms | Equatorial rain belt, hub sites, SCPC backbone |
| Ku band | 1.2 m to 2.4 m | Moderate fade in heavy rain | 550 ms to 650 ms | General purpose across the continent |
| Ka band | 0.98 m to 1.8 m | Sensitive, needs adaptive coding and power control | 550 ms to 650 ms | Best throughput per dollar in drier regions |
| LEO | Flat panel or small tracker | Sensitive, short path helps slightly | 30 ms to 60 ms in region, 70 ms to 140 ms via a European gateway | Interactive apps, video calls, welfare |
Ka band spot beams reach most of the continent, and the outdoor units are small enough that two people can install one before lunch, but rain sets the limit. Across the Gulf of Guinea and the Congo basin, a convective cell will drop a Ka band link for 10 to 40 minutes at a time even with a carefully engineered link budget, so rain fade has to be priced into the availability figure you sign for.
C band still earns its place in the tropics for anything that must not stop. You pay for it: a bigger antenna, more concrete, a higher cost per megabit, and interference planning where mobile networks operate in nearby spectrum. In exchange, the link keeps running through a downpour that has silenced everything else on site.
What does LEO change for a remote African site?
Latency, mostly, and that matters more than people expect. A GEO hop is roughly 600 ms round trip. A LEO hop is usually 30 ms to 60 ms once traffic leaves the constellation locally. Anything with a conversation in it improves sharply: remote desktop, hosted ERP screens, voice and per flow TCP throughput. Geologists pushing survey files to head office notice it on the first morning.
There are two qualifications, and both bite here. Where traffic leaves the constellation decides your real number, and some African sites still transit a European gateway, pushing the round trip to something like 70 ms to 140 ms. Standard LEO plans are also best effort with no committed information rate, so on a bad evening your camp of 400 people shares whatever the beam has left. Welfare traffic can live with that; a plant control network cannot, which is where LEO and MEO services earn their keep alongside a committed link.
Which constellations you may legally use also shifts from year to year, so check the current position for your own country against published Starlink and OneWeb coverage before planning around a named service.
Site conditions that break the link
Power quality and generator switchover
A good proportion of the faults we attend come back to power. Generator changeover leaves a gap of 300 ms to 2 seconds, long enough to reboot a modem and drop the block upconverter mid transmit. Variable frequency drives on crushers and pumps inject harmonic distortion that cheap line interactive UPS units pass straight through. Specify an online double conversion UPS sized for the indoor rack and the outdoor unit, with at least 30 minutes of autonomy.
Dust and thermal management
Iron ore and cement dust blind filters within days, so on a mining site filter changes belong on a fixed calendar. Many outdoor units are rated only to around 50 to 55 degrees Celsius and derate near the top of that band, which a black enclosure in Sahel sun reaches easily. Fit a sun shield, and condition the indoor shelter properly: a steel container with a domestic air conditioner will not hold temperature through an afternoon. Put the feed window on the same schedule, because a dry dust film becomes a real loss once it gets wet.
Humidity, salt and corrosion
Coastal Angola and the Mozambique channel eat hardware, so terminals at oil and gas facilities near the shoreline need a different bill of materials. Use stainless fasteners, marine grade coatings, dielectric grease on every connector, fresh waveguide gaskets, desiccant in the enclosure and drip loops on all cabling, then plan a corrosion inspection twice a year. Terminals that give us three years inland can fail inside eighteen months on the coast.
Lightning and grounding
Parts of central Africa are among the most lightning prone places on earth. You need a single point earth with a measured resistance, a lightning finial above the antenna, surge protection on the interfacility cable and on every Ethernet run out of the shelter, and bonding that does not loop between pad and shelter, because skipping any of it usually costs a modem and a week of downtime per storm season.
Physical security of the terminal
The low noise block and the upconverter are valuable, and two bolts hold each of them on. Fence the pad, cage the feed assembly, fit a tamper switch on your alarm panel and keep the antenna inside camera coverage, and at an unmanned site specify all of it on the assumption someone will come for it.
Customs, VSAT licensing and getting a technician to site
Clearance times vary enormously across African ports, from a few days to well over a month, and duties plus VAT have added anywhere from a few percent to a quarter of declared value on shipments we have handled. Confirm the current tariff line and VAT rate before the airway bill is issued, since temporary import bonds help only where the paperwork already exists. Send a spares kit in the same shipment: a modem, low noise block, upconverter and a length of cable. Shipping one connector separately later can take a month.
VSAT licensing is rarely optional. Most regulators require the terminal type to be approved, the frequency assigned, an annual per terminal fee paid, and the service delivered by a locally licensed operator. Regulators can and do seize unlicensed terminals, and fines and refused customs clearance are both realistic outcomes. Because authorisations are held country by country, coverage is published the same way, for example VSAT services in Nigeria. Ask any bidder for the licence reference covering your country.
Then plan the human side: visas, a mobilisation window of two to ten days, and at least one trained local pair of hands so that a reboot and a pointing check do not require a flight, which means training that person while the commissioning crew is on site.
What satellite internet in Africa costs at a remote site
Budget in two parts: a one off for hardware and installation, and a recurring bandwidth line that dominates the total over a mine life. Committed SCPC capacity with a hard rate guarantee sits well above shared pricing. Capacity over Africa has been getting cheaper for years, so treat the ranges below as planning figures and get a current quote against your own coordinates.
| Cost line | Planning range | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal hardware and installation | 8,000 to 35,000 US dollars | Antenna size, enclosure, travel and crew days |
| Shared bandwidth | 300 to 900 US dollars per Mbps per month | Contention ratio and contract term |
| Committed SCPC capacity | Several times the shared rate | Guaranteed rate and availability figure |
Set that against the fibre arithmetic. A 10 Mbps shared service at those rates is 3,000 to 9,000 US dollars a month, so 36,000 to 108,000 across a year, and a first year including hardware lands somewhere near 44,000 to 143,000 US dollars. The 200 km fibre spur was 3 to 8 million before anyone applied for a wayleave. That gap decides it even where a fibre route is possible on paper, and satellite internet in Africa wins the remote site connectivity argument on capital exposure: a VSAT contract ends when the mine does, and a trench stays in the ground.
What runs over the link?
| Application | Typical bandwidth | Latency sensitivity | Suggested path |
|---|---|---|---|
| SCADA and process control | 64 kbps to 512 kbps per site | Low if polling is tuned | Committed GEO, priority queue |
| Gas detection and safety alarms | Very small | Must never queue | Committed GEO, highest priority |
| Remote controlled and autonomous equipment | 5 Mbps to 20 Mbps per cluster | Very high | On site private network, LEO for supervision |
| ERP, email, corporate access | 2 Mbps to 20 Mbps | Moderate | LEO primary, GEO failover |
| Camp welfare and streaming | 10 Mbps to 200 Mbps shared | Low | LEO, shaped and rate capped |
IoT and OT connectivity for remote plant begins by shrinking the conversation: hold the chatty protocol exchanges on the local side of the modem and lengthen the poll timers. Done that way, running SCADA over satellite looks much like running it over a slow leased line, and the control room stops noticing it within a week. Welfare traffic behaves the opposite way, bursty and happy to consume every bit you own if nobody shapes it.
The pattern that works: committed GEO plus LEO
Take a committed rate GEO carrier sized for operations only, often 4 Mbps to 20 Mbps with a hard guarantee and an availability figure in the contract, then add a LEO terminal for traffic that benefits from short latency or arrives in bursts. An SD WAN edge steers by application: control, safety and voice pinned to the guaranteed carrier, corporate and welfare on LEO with automatic fallback. Failover then happens in seconds, without anyone making a phone call.
A hybrid satellite link is the arrangement most of these operations arrive at eventually, whoever builds it. The commercial effect matters as much as the technical one, because you stop paying committed rates for camp video and your operations traffic stops competing with it.
Checklist before you sign
- Get exact site coordinates and check look angle and horizon obstruction before trusting a coverage map.
- Pull local rain statistics and let those numbers, alongside price, decide the band.
- Confirm the licence reference and the annual fee for a VSAT terminal in that country.
- Ask for the committed information rate and contention ratio in writing; advertised peak speeds tell you little.
- Log site voltage for a week and size the online UPS from the result.
- Specify grounding resistance, surge protection points and enclosure rating in the scope.
- Ship a spares kit and a written parts list in the first consignment.
- Agree the response time for a technician to reach site, and who pays the mobilisation.
- Define traffic priorities before commissioning, so shaping is set on day one.
Where to start
Send the coordinates, the headcount in camp and the list of systems that cannot go offline, and we will come back with a link budget for the band that suits, a rain availability figure, the licensing position for that country and an installed price. If you already have a link that keeps dropping, send the modem logs instead. Start at our contact page.
