Starlink has matured from a novelty into a real enterprise option in Nigeria, but it's not a replacement for fibre. Here's how we think about it inside an SD-WAN underlay strategy.
Starlink launched commercial service in Nigeria in early 2023, and the conversation has shifted dramatically since. What started as a curiosity for remote oil-and-gas sites and individual power users is now a genuine option in enterprise WAN designs, particularly for branches outside the fibre footprint and for sites that need a fully-independent backup path.
But Starlink is not a fibre replacement, and treating it as one will burn you. Latency is good for LEO (typically 50–70 ms median to common cloud regions, with sub-50 ms achievable to local PoPs) but variable. Capacity per terminal is shared. Local distribution and support are still maturing. Starlink does not publish a hard uptime SLA comparable to terrestrial enterprise circuits. And the commercial terms, including pricing, have shifted multiple times since launch (the NCC blocked an attempted hike in October 2024; residential pricing rose ~50% in May 2025).
Our default architecture for sites that can't accept a single point of failure: fibre as primary, Starlink as fully-independent secondary, bonded via SD-WAN with application-aware path selection. Real-time traffic stays on fibre when fibre is healthy; bulk transfers and backups can be steered to whichever path is cheaper at the moment.
If your network depends on a single ISP today, Starlink (or another LEO option) is now a credible second leg. The right architecture isn't 'switch to Starlink', it's bond it as a second underlay, with policy-driven path selection.
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