Insights
Notes from the people who run the network
Not press releases. What we have learned building and operating infrastructure in Somalia — the design decisions, the failure modes, and the things that only show up on a bad day.
Written by engineers
These are written by the people who operate the equipment, not by a marketing department describing it from a distance.
Sourced where it matters
Where an article rests on a fact — a regulator’s register, a statute, a physical constant — we cite it so you can check rather than trust.
Including what we cannot do
Several of these say plainly where our capability stops. That is more useful to you than a longer list, and cheaper for both of us.
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Connectivity
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September 24, 2026
Antennas are the cheap part of a ground station
Satellite operators need ground stations in places that are difficult to establish a presence in. The dish is rarely what takes eighteen months — it is…
September 24, 2026
Nobody wants to own the last mile
International capacity stopped being Somalia's constraint some years ago. Getting it the final few kilometres is the part that is civil works, permits and maintenance —…
September 24, 2026
The first fortnight of a response is a connectivity problem
A drought or a flood does not wait for a procurement cycle. Two things decide whether an operation can function in its first two weeks, and…
September 24, 2026
Aviation networks do not fail gracefully
Most enterprise networks degrade. Air traffic communications do not have that middle state, which changes what you are buying and how you should specify it.
September 24, 2026
Why a transponder map is not a maritime picture
Somalia has the longest coastline in mainland Africa and very little looking at it. Most maritime awareness programmes start with vessel tracking data — which is…
September 24, 2026
What satellites can actually tell you about Somalia
Somalia is one of the least measured countries on earth, and has been photographed from orbit every few days for two decades. The gap between those…
September 24, 2026
The satellite hub in another country is costing you a second
Most satellite service sold into Somalia is operated from a hub on another continent. The physics of that decision are not subtle, and they show up…
September 24, 2026
Somalia’s Data Protection Act: what it actually asks of you
Somalia has had a Data Protection Act since March 2023, and a Data Protection Authority to enforce it. Most organisations holding Somali personal data have not…
September 24, 2026
Which submarine cables actually land in Somalia — and how to check
Somalia's National Communications Authority publishes a register of every submarine cable landing in the country, and who operates each landing station. If you are buying capacity,…
May 15, 2026
How many companies are between you and the beach manhole?
Every ISP in Somalia is reselling somebody's capacity. The question that decides your margin, your latency and your outage experience is how many parties sit between…
May 14, 2026
How to test a diversity claim before you need it to be true
Every provider will tell you their network is redundant. Redundancy is a property of a physical path, not of a proposal, and there are five questions…
May 13, 2026
The office cupboard was never a data centre
For most of the last decade, keeping records in Somalia meant a server in a room nobody had designed for one. That was not a choice…
May 12, 2026
What actually belongs in country, and what does not
Data residency arguments tend to produce one of two bad outcomes: nothing moves, or everything does. Neither is right, and the sorting rule is simpler than…
May 11, 2026
When satellite is the right answer, and when we will tell you it is not
Satellite is sold hardest to the people who need it least. Four situations where it is genuinely the correct engineering choice — and the cases where…
May 10, 2026
Coverage is a backhaul problem, not a radio problem
Putting a base station in a town is the easy part. Getting its traffic back to a core network, in a country where most of the…
May 9, 2026
The outage that costs a bank money is the one at 4pm
Somalia runs one of the most mobile-money-dependent economies in the world, which makes the network underneath it systemically important. For a financial institution, network design is…
May 8, 2026
Sovereignty is decided by where the rack is
A digital public service is only as sovereign as the building its records sit in. Four questions settle it, and none of them are answered by…
May 7, 2026
Broadcast traffic is not big, it is relentless
A contribution feed does not care what your peak speed is. It cares whether the capacity is there for the whole duration, every time — which…