Airtel and Telkom have found themselves in a sort of “watchlist” situation by the Communications Authority of Kenya. Despite reporting market gains in Q3 2020, the two mobile operators have been put under scrutiny, for violating the quality of telecom services on their networks.
The communications regulator reported that Airtel and Telkom Kenya failed to meet the 80 percent minimum threshold on service quality across 33 counties in the year ended June 2020.
According to a survey conducted by the CA, Telkom was just 7 percent below the threshold-73 percent while Airtel scored an average 52 percent overall mark. Safaricom reigned the survey with an impressive 92 percent.
The survey was meant to monitor the quality of different services offered by the three mobile networks which include Voice, Data, and Short Message Services (SMS).
CA went ahead and issued notices of non-compliance to the two telecommunication companies to improve the quality of their services. The Authority will evaluate their performance in the 2020/2021 assessments for confirmation of compliance to the set threshold.
Failure to adhere to the compliance, the mobile operators risk a fine of up to 0.2 percent of their revenues. Seems like a small price to pay, but the actual figure could run into hundreds of millions of shillings.
The survey indicated that Airtel subscribers in Narok, Kiambu, and Kajiado experienced the highest outages when making calls as the operator scored 20 percent in the counties.
Kisumu mobile subscribers were best served as all three mobile operators scored 100 percent. Tharaka-Nithi was the lowest-ranked county with an average of 47 percent in service quality.
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Alfred Gitonga is a passionate tech news writer with a deep interest in smartphones and related technologies. He is a staff writer at Mobitrends.co.ke.
