In the world of technology sales, the Middle East and Africa (MEA) is often treated like one big team. A single scoreboard, a shared set of KPIs, and, ideally, one unified approach to quotas, same manager. But the experiences of the salespeople on the ground are usually different. Anyone who’s spent time selling across the region knows the secret: while Middle Eastern clients will answer “target questions” with some level of clarity, the African client has a knack for making even the simplest inquiries feel like an ordeal to test the faith of the saints. Budgets are less clear, priorities keep shifting, minds that matter keep changing, and what went out expecting a straightforward “yes or no” often comes back as a story, a negotiation, or a challenge. Or all three.

From a distance, the Middle East and Africa can appear strikingly similar to technology vendors and sales leaders. Both regions present numerous opportunities for greenfield rollouts in telecom and digital infrastructure. Legacy constraints are thinner than in Europe or North America, spectrum is often available, and there is genuine room to leapfrog directly into cloud-native networks, AI-native smart architectures. The similarities quickly dissolve though.

From the outset, it is important to recognize that neither region is a monolith. Both the Middle East and Africa comprise many diverse countries, each at its own unique stage of economic development, regulatory maturity, and infrastructure readiness, shaped by local political, cultural, and market conditions. The broad trends described below are not absolute rules to be applied across the board, and successful sales strategies ultimately depend on deep local understanding rather than regional generalization.

The realities of revenue concentration play out interestingly. In the Middle East, it is entirely possible for a salesperson to achieve, or even exceed, an annual quota through a single large customer or national-scale project. Deal sizes are substantial, procurement is centralized, and once alignment is achieved, revenue accumulates quickly. In Africa, the dynamic is almost the inverse. A salesperson may work with five times as many customers, across multiple countries and operators, and still struggle to meet the same target. Deal sizes are smaller, sales cycles are fragmented, and revenue is distributed across numerous incremental wins. 

Two decades of projects have helped me understand that the twists and turns of certain clients aren’t necessarily obstacles. They are part of what make the market transformative. 

In the Middle East, greenfield telecom deployments are typically the result of deliberate strategic resets. Governments and large operators are intentionally rebuilding digital foundations around 5G, private networks, AI-driven operations, and smart-city platforms. Capital is generally available, long-term vision plays a central role, and projects are frequently justified by strategic positioning rather than short-term return. The primary sales challenge is seldom the availability of budget, but the confidence that a vendor can deliver at scale, and on schedule.

Africa’s greenfield reality is shaped by very different forces. In many markets, networks were not built to full depth or breadth at inception. Legacy infrastructure is often fragmented rather than dense. New RAN deployments are unlikely to be network resets; they are incremental, high-stakes decisions. Each site, upgrade, or spectrum investment must justify itself economically against numerous internally competing priorities.

Paradoxically, this budget constraint often increases impact. Because capital is scarce and highly contested, funding is typically allocated to projects with immediate and tangible outcomes: connecting previously underserved regions or enabling services hitherto unavailable. A single network expansion or upgrade project can simultaneously unlock access to education, financial services, healthcare, logistics, and digital markets. While deal sizes may be smaller, the transformation achieved per dollar invested is often significantly greater than in capital-rich environments.

These contrasting budget realities fundamentally shape how telecom evolutions such as AI-RAN are positioned.

In the Middle East, AI-RAN is more likely to be presented as an optimization layer applied to already substantial investment. It enhances Massive MIMO performance, improves energy efficiency across dense networks, automates operations, and manages complexity at scale. Digital twins are national or city-level constructs, integrated into broader smart-city and digital government platforms, the value narrative emphasizing performance, and futureproofing.

In Africa, AI-RAN plays a more foundational role. Its purpose is not to extract marginal gains from dense networks, but to prevent costly mistakes before they occur. AI-assisted planning, accurate digital surface models, and ROI prediction are used to determine whether project should even start, whether a site should exist at all, how many sites are truly required, and which configurations minimize both capital expenditure and long-term operating risk. Digital twins will typically be smaller, sectional, and tightly scoped around specific areas of interest.

Limited capital is expected to accelerate the adoption of open architectures, shared infrastructure, hybrid network models, and AI-driven planning because they are necessary. In many deployments, intelligence helps to maximize the impact of scarce capital.

Smart budget management in one project can benefit an operator's entire portfolio. Optimised network rollouts prevent overbuilding, cut CapEx waste, and lower operational expenses. Savings from one deployment can fund new initiatives, such as expanding to nearby districts or launching additional services. Strategic planning maximises impact, stretching capital across multiple regions instead of just one site.

Another important point to consider is how tightly telecom is coupled to other infrastructure layers. RAN design cannot be separated from power availability, site economics, and real estate constraints. Hybrid power systems, solar, battery storage, shared towers, and financing instruments can be as decisive as RF performance. Vendors that sell radio capability without addressing these realities may succeed in procurement, but struggle in long-term operation.

For sales teams, the implications are clear. The solutions sold must be designed for economic resilience, operational simplicity, and long-term sustainability. Africa, more than most markets, forces technology to prove its value in the real world. That pressure not only delivers deeper impact locally — it often produces better, more disciplined technology for everyone.

This may indeed happen soon. The thing with Nairobi is that one moment, you would be immersed in the hustle and bustle of the big city, and the next, driving off a few kilometers in one direction, a few turns to the left or right, and you find yourself in the midst of undisturbed nature. Loodariak was one such place, fifteen or so years ago, when I first visited. 

This is the kind of place that would immensely benefit from Starlink coverage. I have expressed in the past that the approach taken by Starlink in Africa was flawed. Now, there are certain telecommunications use cases for which Starlink would legitimately be the best solution. These are in situations such as aircraft in the sky, sailing ships in the ocean, remote islands, sparsely populated rural areas, traveling vehicles, a mine in the middle of the desert, your holiday home in the countryside etc. A satellite service works best when it is a lightly loaded niche product to which a few subscribers connect at a time. This is indeed the approach that Starlink has taken in the USA and Europe, focusing their marketing for use cases in the rural areas, pointedly staying away from the cities. 

In Africa, they have taken a different approach. There was a deliberate push to market the Starlink service to the mass market, specifically to individuals and businesses in the dense urban areas. Starlink may have observed the inherent failings of the African rural economy and the unlikelihood of it generating sufficient demand to sustain their business model. This realization likely influenced their decision to target the urban markets instead, where disposable incomes and demand for connectivity are significantly higher. However, this approach not only undermines the original promise of satellite broadband, to connect remote and underserved areas, but also exacerbates congestion, engendering a first come first served, best effort situation, which leaves the rural users unable to benefit from the service.

Starlink may have recognized that rural users in Africa would find their services unaffordable, so they may have strategically focused on the dense urban areas in Africa where the demand could drive quicker sales. This despite the inherent challenge that Starlink faces, its intrinsically and insolvably insufficient capacity to adequately serve the dense urban market.

A few months ago, I had predicted that this approach was going to yield disappointment among the enthusiastic customers. I did some rough calculations, which I outline below. Admittedly a few figures may be off because I am not privy to the traffic modelling by Starlink or their traffic usage and scheduling policies. 

Elon Musk in a company update early this year, indicated the intention to have 6600 satellites in orbit. The number and data fabric capability of the satellites are:

This will make a total of 6600 satellites. With the throughput capability indicated above, the total capacity of the Starlink system would be 250 Tbps. The satellites are meant to be uniformly distributed around the global sky, leading to the assumption that every location on the surface of the earth has an equal probability to get good service from a Starlink satellite. The reality though is that due to the orientation of the satellite orbits, subscribers at the mid to high latitudes will usually have more Starlink satellites available to serve them than the subscribers at the lower latitudes. Effectively, by dint of design, the guys in Europe and North America will receive better service from Starlink than we at the Equator. But that is a story for another day. 

We want to keep our conversation simple, so let’s keep going with the assumption that you in Kenya will still have the same number of satellites serving you as one in Montana, USA. The earth’s geoid surface area is 509,600,000 square km, while the area of Kenya is 580,370 square km. This means that approximately 0.114% of the earth’s surface is within Kenya. By estimation therefore, at any one time, we would have 2.5 of the 40Gbps satellites and 5 of the 20 Gbps satellites zooming over Kenya. 

The snapshot of the real time satellite proves this, we currently have not more than 10 satellites available to serve the geographical area of Kenya. 

The capacity available to Kenya on Starlink therefore would be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200Gbps.

200Gbps shared for a whole country would be okay if the service was offered for the use cases I earlier mentioned: to soldiers who have set up base near the Somalia border, to the people manning the oil mines and wind energy plant in Turkana, ships berthed off the port of Mombasa, your cottage in a remote village, your yacht in Lake Victoria, and so on. By my estimation then, the number of people in Kenya that could be satisfactorily supported by the Starlink as currently configured could not exceed 30,000. I bravely predicted that the drive to sell Starlink as an alternative to Safaricom Fibre, JTL Fibre or Zuku, targeting the mass market in dense urban areas, was going to end in tears. 

200 Gbps is lower than the capacity that Safaricom can avail to a single population centre in Kenya if needed. 

It did not take long. Already, Starlink service in the Nairobi region, which includes Loodariak is congested, sold out. 

Starlink is now asking the potential subscribers to wait for capacity expansion in its global network before they can join and benefit from Starlink service. However, expanding the capacity of satellite network is far from a straightforward affair. By design, satellite technology does not lend itself to rapid or easy capacity scaling. 

One approach to capacity expansion involves adding more satellites. The Starlink plan was to deploy up to 32,000 satellites, which when complete will increase overall capacity fivefold.

The second approach is to enhance the design of the satellites themselves to enable greater capacity carried per satellite. This plan appears to be underway, as SpaceX already requested the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to modify the operational parameters of its next-generation satellite system. The company sought permission to lower the altitude of these satellites, allowing them to operate closer to Earth, and to use authorized frequencies with greater flexibility. SpaceX argued that these changes would enable fiber-like broadband speeds, faster latency, and ubiquitous mobile connectivity, thereby helping to bridge the digital divide for billions of people. this story sounds familiar though, as it was exactly the same words that were used when they were advertising Starlink service in Nairobi months ago. 

These next-generation satellites, which are significantly larger, promise a tenfold increase in bandwidth. However, achieving this vision requires regulatory approvals not just from the FCC but also from authorities in every country where they plan to offer their services.

Even with these advancements, boosting the number of satellites to 32,000 and increasing the capacity of each satellite tenfold, it will still be insufficient to meet Africa’s connectivity needs if Starlink continues its unethical practice of targeting the dense urban areas as its primary market for satellite broadband. This strategy undermines the core value of satellite technology: serving remote and underserved areas that lack alternative connectivity options.

A broadband user in Loodariak cannot currently benefit from Starlink’s service because the network is congested by Nairobi users. This situation could have been avoided if Starlink had not unethically marketed and sold its services to users in densely populated areas in Nairobi and its suburbs which already have service from FTTX, 4G and 5G FWA and Mobile. Starlink may not have taken very seriously the nature of the settlement patterns in East Africa, where the distinction between urban, suburban and rural areas is often blurred. Underserved Loodariak, for instance, is only 45km from the heart of Nairobi. The satellite footprint serving Loodariak, the expansive ranches of Kajiado, the other side of Machakos etc. is the same one that is congested by the office blocks and high-density apartments of Nairobi city.

Back in 2008, Loodariak had no grid electricity, no cellphone coverage and little evidence of modern infrastructure. Along the route, you were more likely to encounter hundreds of goats ranging unattended than you would the lone herdsman watching them. If your car broke down, you had to walk to Magadi road to seek help. Today, you just need to sit beside your car for 30 minutes, and soon enough a young man on motorcycle will come riding along. A Kenya Power three-phase line now runs all the way to Loodariak Centre, since 2012 thereabouts. The centre itself boasts a primary school, a secondary school, a dispensary, at least three churches and at least one decently sized hotel. Perhaps most notably, there’s now a fully operational mobile telecom tower site offering Safaricom 4G, 3G, and 2G connectivity.

This is development, on the face of it undeniable, visible and tangible, and could be said to be impactful. 

In 2020, Loodariak was one of the unserved and underserved sublocations earmarked for subsidy under the Universal Service Fund (USF) by the Communications Authority of Kenya. The goal was to facilitate infrastructure rollout to ensure coverage for at least 80% of the sublocation's population and 60% of the sublocation's geographical area. This initiative appears to have had some success, significantly improving connectivity in the area. It would appear therefore that as concerns the initiative to extend broadband coverage to the rural areas, previously unserved and underserved, at least with regard to Africa, the regulators and the mobile network operators are making strides towards accomplishing the job, while Starlink expends energy on a job that isn’t theirs.