Nigeria’s Satellite Age: Opportunities Rising, Jobs at Risk
TechCabal interviewed me for a piece examining what happens when the age of satellite broadband reaches scale in Nigeria. For users, the promise is clear: broader penetration, deeper reach into communities and villages, and a real chance to close long-standing connectivity gaps.
But even as we welcome that future, we must also consider the implications for families whose livelihoods are tied to today’s telecom infrastructure. If Nigeria embraces this shift without a framework to protect jobs, we could unintentionally scale social and economic dislocations.
From the TechCabal piece: ‘If you run a business and Amazon AWS is offering you broadband, web hosting, etc, you will end up saving even though you are paying one company,’ Ndubuisi Ekekwe said. ‘Why pay MTN for data and Amazon AWS for web hosting when one company can deliver those services? I think costs will drop for users on aggregate.’”
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Yet, I also cautioned that allowing satellite operators to serve retail customers directly, especially without deep local operational footprints, could disintermediate incumbent telcos and put jobs at risk. The disruption may be subtle at first, but as satellite systems become cheaper and more mainstream, they could eventually do to GSM what GSM once did to CDMA. The future is coming, but we must manage it wisely https://techcabal.com/2026/01/26/why-amazon-and-starlink-wont-compete-the-same-way-in-nigeria/