• Starlink Zimbabwe’s fixed Internet and data traffic rose 42.76% in Q4 2025, from 117.83PB to 168.21PB
• Liquid Intelligent Technologies lost 8.32 percentage points of fixed Internet traffic market share, while its absolute traffic declined from 259.7PB to 232.3PB in a growing market
• Starlink added about 50.4PB of traffic in Q4, more than the sector’s total net growth of about 39PB, showing that satellite broadband is expanding Zimbabwe’s served market beyond fibre corridors
  

Harare- Starlink Zimbabwe has recorded a 42.76% increase in fixed Internet and data traffic in the fourth quarter of 2025, rising from 117.83 Petabytes to 168.21 Petabytes, according to the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe's Q4 2025 Sector Report. In the same quarter, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Zimbabwe's dominant fixed Internet operator and the owner of 32.3% of the country's national fibre backbone at 4,631.4 kilometres recorded an 8.32 percentage point loss in fixed Internet traffic market share, with its share declining from approximately 59% to approximately 50.5%.

Starlink's corresponding share gain of 8.32 percentage points in a single quarter is the largest single-quarter market share movement in Zimbabwe's fixed Internet landscape since the introduction of mass commercial fibre.

Total fixed Internet and data traffic for the sector grew 8.86% from 440.89 Petabytes to 479.94 Petabytes in Q4 2025. The mathematics of Starlink's position within that growth is striking, the sector added approximately 39 Petabytes of total traffic. Starlink alone added approximately 50.4 Petabytes, meaning Zimbabwe's satellite operator generated more additional traffic in Q4 2025 than the entire sector's net growth.

The sector would have contracted without Starlink's contribution. Liquid's absolute traffic declined from 259.7 Petabytes to 232.3 Petabytes, a 10.54% reduction in an environment of overall sector expansion. A market leader that is shrinking in volume terms in a growing market is not managing competitive pressure, but  is losing ground to a structurally different competitor whose technology operates independently of the ground infrastructure Liquid has spent years building.

The competitive dynamics between Liquid and Starlink are not primarily a price competition. They are an infrastructure competition of a different kind. Liquid's 4,631.4 kilometres of fibre backbone is a fixed-point asset that provides exceptional speeds and bandwidth to locations along its physical route, urban business districts, corporate campus connections, data centres, government institutions, and the suburban residential corridors that have been built out with fibre-to-the-home infrastructure over the past decade.

Beyond those corridors, Liquid's service requires leased last-mile infrastructure from TelOne, microwave backhaul, or fixed LTE extensions, each of which adds cost and reduces quality.

Starlink requires nothing of the sort. A flat dish, a power connection, and a clear view of the sky produce speeds comparable to mid-tier fibre in locations that have never been served by any fixed broadband technology , mines, farms, safari lodges, schools in communal areas, secondary city businesses, and the periurban residential areas that fibre economics have never justified reaching. POTRAZ's own data confirms that fixed LTE subscriptions grew 6.99% in Q4 2025, Starlink-driven VSAT subscriptions grew 31.62%, and active fibre subscriptions grew 7.42%, all growing simultaneously, confirming that Starlink is not substituting for existing fixed broadband in already-served locations.

It is creating a new served population in locations that were previously unconnected, and those new connected locations are generating traffic volumes that are reshaping the sector's market share distribution at a pace that no analyst forecast at the beginning of 2025.

Zimbabwe's Internet penetration rate reached 84.55% in Q4 2025, up from 82.87% in Q3. Broadband penetration rose to 82.63%. These improvements are happening in part because Starlink is connecting the final tier of locations that fibre, mobile LTE, and WiMAX could not reach economically. The POTRAZ report notes that 19% of Zimbabwe's population, specifically in urban communities, is within the reach of a 5G network, and 73.7% of the rural population is within reach of 3G.

The gap between those two figures, essentially the connectivity divide between urban and rural Zimbabwe , is the market Starlink is addressing at a pace that ground-based infrastructure cannot replicate. For Liquid, the question that Q4 2025's data forces is not whether Starlink will disrupt the fixed Internet market as it already has. The question is which segment of Liquid's existing customer base is defensible against a competitor whose service requires no right-of-way negotiation, no trench digging, and no local infrastructure investment.

Beyond Starlink's disruption of the fixed Internet market, the Q4 2025 POTRAZ data reveals a sector undergoing accelerated investment alongside emerging cost pressure. Mobile Network Operators invested ZWG 1.08 billion in capital expenditure in Q4 2025, double the ZWG 508.92 million invested in Q3 , a 112% quarter-on-quarter increase that signals an infrastructure investment cycle rather than incremental maintenance spending.

Econet deployed 42 additional 5G base stations in the quarter, bringing its total to 340, while NetOne added 5 for a total of 26. Total sector 5G base stations reached 366 by end of Q4 2025, covering approximately 18.9% of the urban population.

The cost-to-income ratio for MNOs worsened by 2.73 percentage points to 59.95% in Q4 2025, from 57.22% in Q3, as operating costs grew 11.52% against revenue growth of 6.33%. The direction of that divergence , costs accelerating faster than revenue , is the operational tension that accompanies aggressive infrastructure deployment cycles. Capital expenditure is front-loaded in network build-out phases; revenue follows with a lag as the new coverage areas attract subscribers and traffic.

For Econet, whose 5G deployment is the most accelerated in the sector, the Q4 2025 cost-to-income deterioration is an expected consequence of investing ZWG 1.08 billion in a single quarter. Whether the lag between investment and monetisation compresses the ratio in the quarters ahead, or extends the current deterioration into 2026, is the financial performance question the sector's Q1 2026 data will begin to answer.

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