Starlink Ground Station Coming to Zimbabwe in Early 2027, Says ICT Minister

Zimbabwe is getting a Starlink ground station. ICT Minister Tatenda Mavetera says SpaceX has concluded an agreement with one of the local Starlink dealers to set one up in the first quarter of 2027.

She said this on X in reply to Willard Shoko, the independent Starlink researcher who has been pushing for a ground station since before Starlink was licensed here. He has tagged the Minister, the Starlink team, and anyone who would listen, again and again.

“There is no policy nor directive preventing Starlink from setting up a ground station in Zimbabwe,” the Minister wrote, adding that government will monitor progress and play a facilitating role.

According to POTRAZ’s latest sector report, Starlink carried 197.78 Petabytes of data in Q1 2026. Shoko points out that’s about 2PB a day, more than Econet, NetOne and Telecel combined (179.33 PB). Starlink did this with about 86,000 subscriptions. The mobile networks have 13.5 million.

By our calculations from the POTRAZ figures, Starlink carried almost a quarter of all internet traffic in Zimbabwe in Q1 2026, and 31.85% of fixed internet traffic. Spread over the quarter, that’s an average of about 200 Gbps, around the clock. For comparison, the report puts TelOne’s entire equipped international capacity at 245 Gbps. Starlink traffic grew 17.58% in the quarter. If that pace holds, Zimbabwean Starlink users will pass 1 Exabyte this year, as Willard has forecast.

All of that traffic currently leaves through ground stations in other countries.

Why a ground station matters

So your Starlink dish talks to a satellite, and the satellite passes your traffic down to a ground station connected to fibre and the internet. Zimbabwe doesn’t have one, so our traffic travels to ground stations elsewhere in neighbouring countries first. It’s a longer trip that adds latency, the bit of lag you feel on video calls and in games.

To pass traffic down quicker Starlink satellites need a ground station within range. When there’s none nearby, newer satellites relay traffic between each other using lasers to reach a station further away. Older satellites without lasers can’t do this effectively reducing their effectiveness when they are over Zimbabwe. So a ground station in Zimbabwe would let more of the satellites passing overhead serve local users directly, adding capacity and cutting latency.

A local Point of Presence (PoP) would go further. It would keep local traffic inside Zimbabwe, allow peering with local ISPs, and make it possible to cache content like YouTube and Netflix locally. That is, as a Starlink customer your YouTube video would actually be sourced from a local server at Liquid, TelOne or Dandemutande, making your internet experience much faster.

What about Harare?

Harare and Bulawayo sold out within weeks of Starlink’s September 2024 launch. The “sold out” label came off in February, but residential customers still only get offered expensive Priority plans or a waiting list.

A ground station will help, but it won’t solve this alone. Harare’s problem is mostly too many users in one small area for the satellites overhead to serve.

Yes, bringing older satellites into play adds some capacity, but the bigger relief will come from Starlink’s new V3 satellites, which each have about ten times the capacity of the previous generation. A ground station and V3 satellites together could finally open Harare to ordinary residential customers.

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