Agreed. Starlink continues to inexorably grow both its network and its customer base in ever more nations – increasing its vertical integration and first-mover advantages by the day.

In the end this is more powerful than any Chinese belt and road plan.
And this has the ability to keep dictatorships from gaining or keeping power.

Guinea-Bissau won’t be a big deal for SpaceX, at least financially. The country has a population of only about 1.75 million and a GDP-per-capita of about three bucks a day. But Starlink will likely be a pretty big deal for Guinea-Bissau, or at least for that portion of its population able to access it in any fashion.

Guinea-Bissau, by the way, cannot be fairly described as being on Africa’s northern coast. It’s located at about the 8-o’clock point on the generally partial-circular south and west coastal crescent of the West African bulge. It is toward the northern end of a string of ten small coastal savannah and jungle nations I tend to describe collectively as Grasshutistans that run from Senegal to Benin. There are a few much larger landlocked West African nations to which this honorific also applies as well as both coastal and interior nations in the southward-pointing portion of Africa. Truth to tell, based on per capita GDPs, most of Africa qualifies including most of the Mahgreb and even the “resource-rich” nations of Nigeria and South Africa.

Mr. Musk’s continent of birth, even in its entirety, is unlikely to prove much of a market for Starlink services compared to other parts of the world. But that will be consistent with all of the other ways in which Africa seems destined to remain a mostly backwater fraction of humanity for the foreseeable future.