- Airtel, in a petition to the Kenyan Parliament, has blamed the telecoms regulator for unfair allocation of mobile spectrum in favour of Safaricom.
- The company lamented that despite investing heavily in the network to improve customer experience, the telco continued to grapple with lack of spectrum especially in 4G/LTE while Safaricom held surplus spectrum.
Airtel, in a petition to the Kenyan Parliament, has blamed the telecoms regulator for unfair allocation of mobile spectrum in favour of Safaricom. The company lamented that despite investing heavily in the network to improve customer experience, the telco continued to grapple with lack of spectrum especially in 4G/LTE while Safaricom held a surplus spectrum. The petition to Parliament pointed out that while Airtel was allocated 50 MHz of the spectrum, Safaricom was given 82.5 MHz.
Industry data from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) show that Safaricom held 64 per cent of the local market, against Airtel’s 27 per cent share, as at the year ended June. Telkom Kenya holds seven percent of the market.
Another grievance raised by the telco is Kenyan Communication Authority’s (CA) failure to review the fees that mobile phone operators charge each other for interconnecting calls since 2015. This it said was also in favour of Safarico. This fee commonly referred to as mobile termination rate (MTR) has remained frozen at Sh0.99 for the past six years. A rate cut in the rate in 2010 from Sh 4.42 to Sh2.21 invoked a price war between Kenyan telecoms operators. Telecom experts say that and Airtel and Telkom Kenya along with consumers will benefit significantly from a review of the mobile termination rate. Though revenues for Safaricom may fall, the impact would be limited on its earnings due to its high subscriber base. A recent downward revision of MTR in European countries like France, the United Kingdom, and Germany resulted in an increase in subscriber numbers due to low calling tariffs.
CAK director-general Wang’ombe Kariuki in April informed the Senate ICT committee that compliance checks on Safaricom’s M-Pesa, voice, and text services did not reveal any unfair practices. According to CA data, M-Pesa has 98.8 per cent of the active 34.66 million active mobile money users, Airtel Money 0.78 per cent and T-Kash 0.35 per cent.
Airtel’s efforts to enlarge its market share through a merger with Telkom Kenya had to be abandoned. AIrtel cited unacceptable conditions and delays in receiving regulatory approvals for the proposal. Though CAK approved the merger on October 31, 2019, it put forward eight conditions. These included banning the would-be merged entity from selling itself to another party within five years, retaining at least 349 employees in the combined business, barring the entity from transferring operating and frequency spectrum licenses and so on.
