Starlink vs Amazon Leo: only one has a way into South Africa

Where the race stands in August 2026

In orbit, it is not a race at all. On South African soil, the smaller player is winning.

Starlink now has roughly 10,971 operational satellites overhead and live service in seven countries around us: Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. South Africa, Namibia and Angola are the last Southern African holdouts, and Namibia’s regulator went as far as rejecting Starlink’s licence and spectrum applications outright in March 2026.

Amazon Leo, the service formerly called Project Kuiper, has just over 390 satellites deployed against a first-generation plan of 3,236, and its consumer service is still in enterprise preview globally. On raw capability, Starlink is years ahead.

But capability is not availability. On 15 July 2026 Amazon announced its first African retail agreement: Herotel, South Africa’s largest fixed ISP, will sell Amazon Leo connectivity under a new brand called Evry, with commercial launch expected in 2027 and free registration already open at evry.co.za. Starlink, three years after arriving in the region, has no equivalent. It has not even lodged an application with ICASA.

Why Starlink is still blocked

One clause in one Act. The Electronic Communications Act requires 30% ownership by historically disadvantaged groups for the individual ECNS and ECS licences a network operator needs.

SpaceX wants to sell directly to South Africans under its own licence, and it maintains a global policy against giving up local equity. That puts it on a collision course with the ECA’s 30% rule, and the collision has now played out in full.

Communications minister Solly Malatsi tried to build a bridge: a final policy direction, gazetted on 12 December 2025, instructing ICASA to recognise equity equivalent investment programmes (EEIPs), which let multinationals invest in skills, suppliers and infrastructure instead of selling shares. In May 2026 ICASA answered that it cannot do so. The regulator’s position is that recognising EEIPs “would require a legislative amendment to the current ECA”, which means the workaround needs Parliament, not just a minister’s signature.

That verdict matters. Malatsi is now pursuing an Electronic Communications Amendment Bill, but no bill had been tabled at the time of writing, and the reform is contested inside the coalition government, with the ANC framing the push as policy written for one company. Starlink, for its part, has been running an advocacy campaign since January 2026, emailing customers pre-written support messages to send to ICASA. Lobbying is not licensing. Until the Act changes, Starlink has no legal route to market here, which is why the minister could confirm in June 2026 that ICASA had received no application from Starlink for any licence or spectrum at all.

How Amazon Leo gets in without an ICASA fight

Amazon read the same Act and drew the opposite conclusion: do not hold the licence, partner with someone who does.

Herotel serves more than 350,000 customers across 550+ towns on fibre and fixed wireless, and it already holds the ICASA licences and empowerment credentials the law demands. Under the Evry agreement, Amazon supplies wholesale satellite capacity from orbit; Herotel supplies the licences, the billing in rand, and the support desk in South Africa. Amazon Leo’s business chief Trevor Vieweg put it plainly: “Herotel will be holding the licences in this agreement.”

The old version of this story had Vodacom as Amazon’s likely retail partner. That is not how it landed. Vodacom’s parent Vodafone did sign an Amazon Leo deal in March 2026, but for cellular backhaul, using satellites to feed rural towers rather than selling dishes to end users. The retail crown went to Herotel – a company Vodacom still touches indirectly, since it holds 30% of Herotel’s owner Maziv.

What will Evry actually deliver? Herotel’s launch guidance is download speeds of up to 300Mbps on the initial Nano and Pro antennas with latency of around 50ms, which is fibre-class responsiveness. Amazon’s gigabit Ultra terminal, rated at 1Gbps down and 400Mbps up, is aimed at enterprise and is not in the launch lineup. Pricing has not been announced, and any figure you see quoted for South Africa before Herotel publishes one is a guess. For the full background on the constellation, the hardware and the partnerships, read our Amazon Leo South Africa deep-dive.

Starlink vs Amazon Leo: head to head for SA buyers

Judge them on what a South African business can actually buy, not on launch-cadence bragging rights.

Across the border the picture flips: in Lesotho, where Starlink is licensed, the service launched at roughly R950 a month for residential with a R7,400 standard kit. That is the frustration in one number – a working, affordable product sits 100km from Bloemfontein and cannot be sold here.

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