World Richest Man and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, has announced that his satellite internet service, Star Link, has been licensed to operate in Nigeria.
Musk announced on Friday via his official Twitter handle.
Musk had on Tuesday hinted at rolling out the satellite internet service in Africa on his Twitter account after a user asked about his plans for Africa.
Consequently, the billionaire, who is also the founder of Tesla Inc. announced the approval of the internet service on Friday.
“Starlink approved by Nigeria and Mozambique,” Musk tweeted.
He added that the satellite internet service has also been approved by the Philippines.
The new entrant will have to battle for customers who are currently subscribing to internet service from MTN, Globacom, Airtel, 9mobile, and over 200 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) earlier licensed by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
Although Starlink has an edge over other service providers in that it will be providing its service via satellite, which can be accessed anywhere all over the country, its survival will depend on how competitive its prices are.
According to SpaceX, Starlink was launched as a low-earth orbiting (LOE) constellation of satellites to provide low latency, high bandwidth internet to consumers across the globe.
A low latency network connection is one that generally experiences small delay times, while bandwidth refers to the amount of information that a connection to the internet can handle at a given time.
Starlink internet is said to work by sending information through the vacuum of space, where it travels much faster than in the fibre-optic cable.
It is also said to be ideally suited for areas where connectivity has typically been unreliable or completely unavailable.
