Ask a Somali mobile operator why a particular town does not have decent service and the answer is almost never about radios. Base stations are a solved commodity. What decides whether that site gets built, and what it costs to run once it is, is how the traffic gets from the tower back to the core — and in most of this country there is no leased circuit to buy.

Three ways to backhaul, and where each stops making sense

Fibre

Cheapest per bit by a wide margin, and effectively unlimited in capacity. It is also the option that requires somebody to have built a route to that town — civil works, permits, plant, and a maintenance capability afterwards. Where fibre exists, nothing else competes. The difficulty is that where it exists is a much smaller map than where coverage is wanted.

The economics turn on whether you are building the route or buying capacity on one somebody else built. A route built for one operator’s single site rarely pays for itself. The same route carrying several operators, plus enterprise traffic and an access network, does.

Microwave

The traditional answer for the gap: cheaper than trenching, quick to deploy, good capacity over line of sight. The constraints are line of sight itself, tower infrastructure at both ends, rain fade at higher frequencies, and the fact that each hop is another site to power and maintain. A chain of hops across difficult terrain becomes its own reliability problem.

Satellite

The option people reach for last and should sometimes reach for first. It does not care about terrain, distance from the nearest fibre, or whether there is a tower halfway. It deploys in days rather than quarters. What it costs you is capacity — priced per megabit in a way fibre is not — and latency, which matters for some traffic and not for others.

The calculation operators get wrong

Satellite backhaul is frequently dismissed on cost per megabit without the comparison being completed. The honest comparison is not satellite against fibre — it is satellite against fibre plus the eighteen months and the capital to build it, or against not covering the town at all.

A site that generates revenue from month two on satellite, and is later migrated to fibre when a route reaches it, is usually a better business than a site that waits for the route. It also establishes whether the demand is really there before anyone commits to civil works.

There is a second use that gets missed. A fibre-fed site with satellite as a protection path is genuinely diverse in a way a second fibre rarely is, because the two share nothing — no duct, no route, no landing station. For sites where an outage has a regulatory or commercial cost, that is the cheapest real redundancy available.

Where the hub sits, again

For satellite backhaul specifically, the location of the teleport matters more than for a single enterprise terminal. Backhaul traffic is aggregated, sustained, and heading for a core network that is almost certainly in Somalia.

If the hub is abroad, every packet from that town travels to another continent and back before it reaches your core. You have paid the satellite hop, the international transit, and a round trip you did not need — for traffic whose origin and destination are both inside the country. The arithmetic on that is not subtle.

With an in-country hub, the traffic lands in Mogadishu and hands onto terrestrial capacity here. Same satellite hop, no detour.

The design question worth asking first

Not “fibre or satellite” but “what is this site’s traffic, where is it going, and what does an outage cost”. A site carrying voice and mobile money for a district has a different answer from one carrying data overflow in a city already covered.

The practical pattern that works in this market is a mix: fibre where a route exists or can be justified, satellite to reach ahead of the fibre and to protect the sites that cannot drop, and a plan for migrating sites from one to the other as the footprint grows. Operators who commit to one technology across the whole network tend to be either overspending on capacity or under-covering the country.