Back in 2021, we posted this video of one of SpaceX's early Starlink launches, another Falcon 9 dropping off a fresh batch of satellites in low Earth orbit, back when "wait, internet from space actually works?" was still a fair question. Five years later, nobody's asking that anymore.

By September 2026, Starlink had grown into the largest satellite constellation ever launched, more than 11,000 satellites in orbit according to tracking data from HighSpeedInternet.com, up from that first batch of just 60 back in 2019. SpaceX confirmed it had crossed 12 million active subscribers across more than 160 countries and territories in a June 2026 update from Elon Musk, reported by Yahoo Finance and TeslaNorth. The pace of that growth is the wilder part: Starlink reportedly went from 10 million to 12 million subscribers in about 53 days, adding roughly 27,000 new customers a day.

Some of that curve is playing out in ways worth paying closer attention to close to home. Africa has become a genuinely fast-growing part of Starlink's subscriber base, and Zimbabwe in particular has turned into one of the more surprising success stories on the continent, closing in on fibre and trailing only Nigeria in reported subscribers. We went deep on why Zimbabwe has the second-highest Starlink uptake in Africa if you want the full numbers. Uganda just joined the Starlink map too, though at a noticeably steeper price than what Zimbabwean subscribers pay, a reminder that the same service doesn't cost the same everywhere on the continent.

None of that was obvious back when this launch video first went up. Starlink was still mostly a beta service for rural households and hobbyists in a handful of countries, and "12 million subscribers worldwide" would have sounded like a rounding error away from science fiction. Five years isn't long in most industries. In satellite internet, it turns out to be an eternity.

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Rufaro