Over 2,000 customers exited the service between December 2024 and March 2025.

New figures from the Communications Authority (CA) place Starlink’s total fixed internet subscribers at 17,066 by the end of Q1 2025. That’s a drop of over 11% within a single quarter, pulling the company down from the seventh to the eighth spot among internet service providers (ISPs) in Kenya. 

The timing coincides with a prolonged pause in new sign-ups and an aggressive drive by Safaricom to overtake the fixed broadband market.

The collapse in user growth traces back to Starlink’s decision to halt new connections across major urban and peri-urban counties, including Nairobi, Kiambu, and Machakos. 

The reason is overcapacity; too many users, not enough infrastructure. A Nairobi ground station was eventually switched on in January 2025 to ease the burden, but the damage was already done. Many who had spent over KES 45,000 ($348) on Starlink hardware were left waiting, months on end, for access.

Even now, with the waitlist reopened, growth hasn’t recovered. Some customers appear to have abandoned the service altogether, citing connection delays, lack of support, and the high KES 6,500 ($50) monthly fee for speeds of 180 Mbps. 

Meanwhile, Safaricom swooped in with cheaper 5G plans starting at KES 4,000 ($31) per month for 50 Mbps. More importantly, the company cut its router prices from KES 25,000 to KES 3,000, more than ten times cheaper than Starlink’s hardware.

Safaricom’s moves are working. It added nearly 57,000 fixed broadband subscribers in the first quarter of 2025 alone, increasing its market share to 36.5%. Starlink, by comparison, slipped from 1.1% to 0.9%. Even Dimension Data overtook it in the rankings.

Distribution patterns reveal another dimension of Starlink’s challenges. Supermarket chains like Carrefour have started reducing the stock of Starlink kits. Quickmart has shifted to marketing Safaricom’s 5G routers instead. 

The early excitement generated by Elon Musk’s online endorsements and local tech influencers is waning. Starlink’s dominance in satellite internet, currently holding 97% of Kenya’s satellite market, is beginning to look fragile.

And now, regulatory threats are emerging. The CA has proposed a near tenfold increase in satellite licence fees, from KES 1.6 million to KES 15 million. An additional 0.4% levy on annual gross turnover is also on the table. These changes, framed as efforts to create parity between global and local players, will hit Starlink’s margins hard.

Globally, Starlink added more than 1.5 million users in three months, reaching 5.36 million subscribers as of March 2025. Africa accounted for 336,000 of those, marking a 42% rise. But in Kenya, the direction has turned. 

Even with its wide reach into underserved regions and relatively high speeds, Starlink’s challenges might soon move beyond technical, to financial, political, and strategic. 

This means streams of information can be divided into packets and then routed to different destinations.

Most history of internet growth does not delve deep into packet switching but it played an important role in the process. It was developed in the 1960s and was widely adopted by the early 1980s.

Internet Statistics 2022: Facts You Need-to-Know

• There are over 5.47 billion active internet users.
• As of February 2022, China has over 1 billion active users.
• There are more than 1.98 billion websites online.
• 4.32 billion people use their mobile devices to go online.
• There are 198.4 million active websites on the web.
• Around 7 million blog posts get published per day.
• There are 4.2 billion active social media users in 2021.
• 47% of internet users globally use an ad-blocker today.
• Cybercrime costs $3.5 billion for US businesses in 2019.
• Twenty-six smart objects are located near every human on earth.
• As of 2021, more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. 

(Source: Firstguide.com)

Packet switching can be applied to current technologies like wireless networks and allows for faster transmission and more efficient use of bandwidth.

Packet switching is what allows your computer to communicate with other computers on the internet. It works by dividing large chunks of information into smaller parts and then sending them out over a network in their own little packets. This way, if one packet gets corrupted or lost, you don’t lose the whole thing.

Packets are small pieces of information that can be sent to other computers in the network and then reassembled at their destination. The first computer that receives the packet determines whether it should accept or discard it.

Packet switching enabled internet growth by allowing computers on different networks to communicate with each other, which made it possible for users to connect their computers to the internet without having to manually configure them. This made it easier for people who didn’t know how to configure their machines to access the internet.

This innovation can also be applied to current technologies, such as cellular networks and Wi-Fi hotspots. For example, when you’re on your phone talking with someone else and they’re using another phone with a different carrier than yours, both phones will share their data connection via packet switching—it’s just not done automatically like it is with an IP address.

Did you know packet switching also allowed the internet to be a global network? 

Well it did. It is packet switching that made it possible for us to send and receive information from anywhere in the world.

The internet was once a small network that was restricted to only a few universities and research institutions. However, with packet switching, this changed drastically. 

Now we can send and receive information from any part of the world with ease. This has been possible due to packet switching, which makes it possible for people all over the world to communicate with one another.

Networks are interconnected globally

Before packet switching occurred on computers, their networks would only communicate with each other locally within their own country or region. With packet switching, however, they were able to connect with each other across countries and continents at much faster speeds than before.

Packet switching is an internet technology that allows data to be routed across networks in a way that is independent of the physical location of the network. It uses IP addresses, which are assigned to devices by routers and allow for multiple devices to be connected to one network.

This allows a device to connect with any other device in the world, regardless of their physical location. This was especially important when the internet was first created, because it made it possible for people around the world to communicate with each other through their computers or phones. It also allowed for companies like Google and Facebook to build up their businesses by connecting with people all over the world.

What’s More?

The importance of packet switching is that it enables new technologies, like cloud computing and mobile apps, which wouldn’t have been possible without it. 

Packet switching also makes it easier for companies like Netflix and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver products using internet connectivity instead of relying on local data centers or satellite connections (which can be expensive).

The way we can apply packet switching today is by using software-defined networking (SDN). SDN allows us.

Data packets routed through multiple networks

Packet switching allows each packet of information to be sent independently, without affecting the rest of the network. This means that packets can be sent at any time or in any order, and they will still reach their destination.

Packet switching was first used in the ARPANET, which was a network of computers connected via telephone lines. The first computer to use packet switching was at UCLA in 1971.

The internet grew because it enabled people all over the world to connect with each other for free. Packet switching allowed users to use remote access services such as Telnet and FTP instead of having to rent expensive dedicated servers for each site they wanted to access.

It allows multiple devices to share a single connection, while still maintaining the security and reliability of a dedicated network connection.

This type of technology has been used to enable the growth of the internet over the past 30 years, because it can handle high volume traffic without slowing down internet speeds. Packet switching enabled the growth of large companies such as Microsoft and Google, which relied on packet switching to connect their data centers across the world.

Today, we’re still using packet switching to connect our computers and mobile devices over wireless networks like Wi-Fi or LTE. But there are other ways to use it—for example, you can even use it as a backup for your home internet connection in case your ISP goes down!

This method of data transfer has enabled the internet to grow and become more powerful, because it allows for more efficient use of bandwidth and works with any kind of communication medium, not just telephone lines.

Packet switching is still used today, but it is being replaced with other technologies as faster and more reliable methods are developed.

When you send an email, you’re actually sending hundreds of individual messages to the recipient. Rather than sending them all at once, though, your computer sends each one as it arrives—and the email server stores only the most recent messages (or “packets”) for each sender.

Because there’s no guarantee that all recipients will receive a message at exactly the same moment (even on perfectly working networks), packets are sent sequentially rather than simultaneously. This makes it possible for computers on different networks to communicate with each other without having to wait for one another to finish sending packets.

Packet switching has enabled the growth of the internet because it allows people from different countries and continents to communicate with each other without having to rely on a single company or organization holding their data hostage. It also means that content creators can reach audiences from anywhere in the world without having to pay extra for local delivery costs.