Safaricom tariff rise reduced industry's voice traffic

Mobile operator Safaricom's move to increase call tariffs in October led to an 18 per cent drop in voice traffic within its network in the three months to December, contributing to a significant decline in the industry's traffic.

Data from the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) show that mobile traffic declined to 6.70 billion minutes in the quarter to December compared to 7.09 billion minutes in the same period a year earlier.

This emerged despite a six per cent growth in the mobile phone subscriptions in the country to 20.08 million—pushing the penetration rate to 71.2 per cent from 67.2 per cent in the same quarter in 2010.

"This was as a result of increase in tariffs by a key mobile operator that led to the reduction in local mobile traffic," said CCK in response to the drop in voice traffic.

Safaricom lost share of the voice traffic market by 10 percentage points to 77 per cent, giving room to its subscribers whose calling rates are lower to grow their stakes.

Airtel gained 6.24 percentage points to record 12.79 per cent market share from 6.55 per cent recorded during the previous period.

Essar Telecom (yuMobile) grew its share to 8.53 per cent market from 4.58 per cent while Orange gained 0.22 percentage points to record 0.82 per cent market share from 0.60 per cent

Orange currently charges Sh2 for calls within its network and Sh4 to its rivals. Both Airtel and Yu are charging Sh3 within and out of their network.
Safaricom charges sh4 within its network and Sh5 to other networks—and it revised its charges by about 25 per cent in October after it reported a 47.4 per cent drop in profits in the six months to September.

Safaricom's market share of subscribers dropped to 66.6 per cent down from 67.7 per cent recorded during the previous period. Airtel's stood at 15.2 per cent down from 15.7 while Orange recorded 10.3 per cent from 10.4 per cent. Essar's increased to 7.9 per cent from 6.2 per cent.

During the quarter under review, the four mobile operators experienced gains in subscriptions with Safaricom recording the highest gains with 741,560 new subscriptions from 593,177 recorded in the previous period.

Essar Telecom (yuMobile) followed with 600,285 new subscriptions up from 46,742 recorded during the previous period.

Mobile money transfer subscriptions rose by 3.08 per cent from 18.4 million in the previous period to 18.9 million.

Meanwhile, Internet service continued to rise steadily during the quarter to stand at 6,152,687 Internet subscriptions from 5,422,009 during the previous period, representing a 13.48 per cent increase.
The estimated number of Internet users rose by 21.55 per cent from 14.30 million users in the previous period to 17.38 million during the period under review.
By MUTAHI BASSE

Airtel promotes Bhargava to Kenya MD

Bharti Airtel has announced the appointment of Shivan Bhargava as Managing Director for its Kenyan operation. Shivan was earlier the Chief Operating Officer and in his new role he will be responsible for leading Airtel's aggressive growth plans in the country.

Jayant Khosla, the Chief Executive Officer of Airtel Africa Anglophone Region, said: "Kenya has always been a key market with great potential for growth within the region. Our leadership and management team in Kenya is made up of exceptionally talented, experienced, passionate and committed individuals. Shivan's experience and qualifications will add value to the team and Airtel's future plans to deliver innovative and best-in-class mobile services. I wish him success in his new assignment."

Shivan has been with Bharti Airtel since 2003 and has significantly contributed to growth of the business.

Shivan has experience in both technical and marketing and has an Engineering degree specializing in Telecommunications. Shivan also has a post graduate qualification in Business Management, specialized in Marketing and has a proven track record in commercial operations for more than 16 years with Coca-Cola and Airtel.

East Africa Com tech conference opens in Nairobi

The 7th annual technology conference, East Africa Com, opens in Nairobi on Tuesday, 17th April.

The Information Technology summit runs from 17- 18 of April in Nairobi where the Exhibition aims to give delegates an overview of all the latest "need to know" topics on the world's foremost technology and solution providers.

About 600 decision makers from across the entire Digital Ecosystem such as service providers, social media players, apps developers, content providers, digital media brands and mobile advertisers have confirmed participation.

"The East Africa Com conference agenda addresses the hottest topics facing the Digital ecosystem in East Africa.

"Each session is about stimulating discussion using a series of C-Level roundtables, interviews, presentations, case studies and question and answer panel sessions," reads the conference agenda sheet at a glance.

The meeting comes at a time when Africa is increasingly drawing global attention for its rapid growth in mobile telephony and associated sectors.

Across Africa, mobile technology is becoming a cornerstone for industries like health care and agriculture and for millions it is making banking truly accessible for the first time.

According to a GSMA report of 2011 "nearly 90 per cent of all phones in Africa are mobile phones" and by end of 2012 there would be 735 million mobile subscribers in Africa.

Latest statistics form Communication Commission of Kenya indicates that close to 18 million Kenyans use mobile phones as a bank account, depositing and transferring money remotely to avoid excessive travel and wait times.

By James Ratemo

Telkom’s LION2 lands in Kenya

Kenya has now gotten a fourth submarine fibre optic connection to the world, when the Lower Indian Ocean Network cable (LION2) operated by Telkom Kenya went live.

Telkom Kenya Chief Executive Officer Mickhael Ghossein said LION2, whose laying cost over Sh5.7 billion (57 million Euros), is now operational and will significantly boost Kenya's bandwidth capacity.
The cable lands in Kenya after The Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy), The East African Marine System (TEAMS) and SEACOM. It is a 2,700 kilometers long extension of the initial Lower Indian Ocean Network that connects Madagascar to the rest of the world, providing alternate onward connectivity from Kenya to Asia and Europe.

"Besides improving our services, LION2 will also play a great role in addressing redundancy, especially during outages like the ones experienced in March that impacted both TEAMs and EASSy, while in turn reassure the firm's customers of business continuity, network stability and reliability," said Ghossein.

LION2 extends from Mayotte, an island off the Indian Ocean Coast to Mombasa. It links East Africa to Madagascar, Mayotte and the Reunion Island, providing an opportunity for increased international traffic through Kenya which further strengthens the country's positioning as a regional communication hub.

LION2 uses advanced technology for submarine cables – wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and it will currently offer a maximum capacity of 1.28 terabytes per second (tbps) in future, this capacity can be increased without additional submarine work.

The construction of the LION2 cable represents a total investment of around Sh5.7 billion of which Sh3.8 billion comes from France Telecom and its subsidiaries.

The laying of LION2 cable began in the fourth quarter of 2010. Apart from LION2, Telkom Kenya has also invested heavily in other joint broadband infrastructure projects including TEAMS and EASSy submarine cables and terrestrial backbone and is currently expanding its high quality wireless network for both GSM and CDMA across the country.

by NDERITU NDEGWA

Govt to put up new data centre

The government is mulling putting up an upgraded National Data Center (NDC) to boost its internal efficiencies and compliment the current centre which is already operating at full capacity.

Information Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo said the government is seeking input from the private sector for the country's second data centre that will expand the current capacity of 30 terabytes.

"To do a good Level 4 National Data Center it's anything between $200 million and $250 million. We are looking at another one year before we can see a virtual environment," he said.

The NDC is part of the government's strategy to centralise the management of data from ministries and government agencies to cut operational costs, through the launch of three data centres.

Efforts to digitise various ministries have made headway although hitches at the Lands Ministry have slowed the process.

The PS said it will take almost $1 billion to fully digitise the ministry, but funding has been difficult to come by.

"If Lands (Ministry) were willing that we do their data, their revenue would move from Sh7 billion to almost Sh40 billion. When we went there, there were files all over, then we created the banking hall and revenue jumped to Sh7 billion from Sh3 billion," he said.

Making the move to e-procurement, Ndemo added, would save the government $1 billion annually.

The PS was speaking during an event hosted by storage and data management solutions company NetApp that explored opportunities for storage and data management in Kenya's IT industry.

NetApp is making an aggressive attempt to solidify its lead position as a storage and data management provider in the region, looking at setting up an office in another four to five months to complement its reseller network.

"Our model going forward is indirect. We started off with people coming in from other countries to support the East Africa region, but now we have local partners. The people that are delivering the solutions for NetApp are locally based," NetApp Channel Lead Prem Pather said.

In efforts to improve end-user support and service delivery NetApp partnered with Business Connexion to distribute NetApp products in the country.

Moving forward Pather said the company is looking to expand its offerings to the government as it continues to digitize ministry records and other solutions.

by VICTORIA RUBADIRI