07 February 2024

The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) has imposed penalties on Telkom Kenya and Airtel Kenya for poor quality of service at the end of the 2022/2023 financial year.

The operators have performance rates of 65% and 79% for a regulatory threshold of 80%. Safaricom is at near 90%.

“Airtel Kenya Networks and Telkom Kenya failed not only to meet their coverage targets, but also a number of key quality of service indicators, particularly the ‘unsuccessful call ratio’ and key internet data indicators, which are an indicator of Internet coverage and availability/accessibility, respectively,” said the report.

Telkom Kenya and Airtel are reportedly struggling to find a place in a market dominated by Safaricom, which at the end of the 2022/2023 financial year held 66.1% share of the mobile telephony market compared to 27.2% for Airtel and 3.8% for Telkom. Additionally, Safaricom controls 62.8% of mobile broadband subscriptions and 97.1% of mobile money users.

“Service quality is considered to be a product of market investment levels, investment levels are considered a product of subscriber numbers and revenue generation, and market balance and trust of consumers are a product of regulatory interventions,” said the CA in a statement.

Accordingly, the CA has pledged to pursue regulatory interventions that will balance the market and ensure the success of the different players.

Despite escaping financial penalty from the CA, Safaricom also recorded a drop in its quality of service (QoS) for a third consecutive year. Safaricom’s end-to-end QoS performance, which measures communication services’ overall quality and reliability, dropped from 95.68% in 2020/2021 to 95% in 2021/2022. In 2023, this number dropped to 87.60%.