According to Sefalana Trading, resellers of Starlink, the service has reached capacity in Gaborone. This means users who will purchase the kit in Gaborone and surrounding areas after this period will not get any signal.
"The service is oversubscribed and reached its allocated limit for the time being. Starlink is working on increasing capacity in Gaborone," Sefalana said.
Other markets in Africa have faced the same issue recently. In November, due to a surge in usage, Starlink suspended new installations in several African markets, including Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, to curb network congestion, which might lead to slow speeds and latency.
Due to the nature of low-earth orbit satellite internet, Starlink can only support a limited number of customers per a certain geographical area.
A common rule of thumb is the "100in300 rule", meaning 100 subscribers can be supported in a 300km2 area. If that number is exceeded, users will start reporting lower speeds and latency issues.
To address this issue, Starlink must constantly launch satellites to keep up with demand. What has likely hastened the issue in the markets where the service has had to be paused in Africa is that a lot of demand has filled up the available network quite fast, especially in urban areas.
Starlink satellites provide signal coverage zones on the Earth’s surface, with an estimated diameter per satellite of 25km, coverage of around 400 km2 per satellite, and a bandwidth capacity of 20 Gbps. Theoretically, each satellite will then be able to service 2,000 subscribers at a speed of 10Mbps, with an average demand of 200GB per subscriber per month.
However, since Starlink deploys cellular-type network architecture, it exhibits similar network behaviour to mobile networks and, therefore, is affected by cell loading and cell congestion.
The good news is that SpaceX is constantly sending up more satellites into orbit to match demand and prevent network congestion.