More than two-thirds or 32 out of Kenya’s 47 counties are receiving services from local telco firms that fall below the industry-set quality standard, underscoring gaps that exist in the country’s network coverage.
The industry’s average performance continues to be weighed down by Telkom Kenya’s score.
Fresh data from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) shows that Safaricom, Airtel Kenya and Telkom Kenya attained the 80 percent quality mark in just 15 counties during the year ended June 2024, marking a slight improvement from the eight counties recorded in the preceding year.
The 15 include Nairobi, Lamu, Machakos, Narok, Nakuru, Garissa, Marsabit, Nyeri, Kirinyaga and Murang’a. Others are Elgeyo Marakwet, Kisumu, Bomet, Kisii and Nyamira.
“The performance per county shows that Airtel met the threshold in 24 out of 47 counties, Safaricom in 30, and Telkom Kenya in three out of 47 counties. The average drive test QoS (Quality of Service) performance countrywide was 73.49 percent,” wrote CA.
“An assessment of the mobile network operators’ performance in the five counties that have cities, shows that Airtel and Safaricom met the 80 percent threshold in the three out of the five counties, while Telkom failed in all the counties with cities.”
Telkom posted the 80 percent passing grade in just three counties — Lamu, Marsabit and Kisii — dragging down the industry performance as its two rivals had attained the threshold in over half of the counties.
In the year to June 2023, Safaricom had achieved compliance in all but six counties, while Airtel had ticked the threshold in 22 counties.
This underperformance in the telecoms industry comes at a time when the country’s uptake of mobile devices has been steadily rising in recent years, with smartphones being acquired at the fastest pace yet during the three months ending in December, when 4.1 million devices were purchased by Kenyans.
Telco KPIs
Section 23 of the Kenya Information and Communications Act, 1998, mandates the industry regulator to ensure that licensed telecom operators and service providers offer high quality services in line with licence conditions.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) used to assess telco operations include dropped call ratios, call setup time, voice quality, data latency and transfer failure ratio, as well as SMS completion rates, among others.
According to the CA, these are assessed using drive tests for outdoor sites and walk tests for indoor settings.
In a national overview, Telkom was the only operator to miss the passing grade, posting an overall score of 67.6 percent of the set KPIs, with Safaricom and Airtel surpassing the threshold to attain 88.1 percent and 83.3 percent respectively.
Traditionally, the CA imposes penalties on non-compliant operators, accompanied by notices of compliance, which require the networks to improve their current scores by the next assessment, with continual non-compliance leading to application of escalated sanctions.
