Safaricom deal on service quality eases renewal of licence
Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore. Photo/Gerald Anderson
What you need to know:
Communication Authority of Kenya (CAK) has been conducting the quality of service studies, which showed Safaricom and the other three main rivals performing below the minimum acceptable benchmarks.
Safaricom expects to get formal approval of the licence before or on June 9, after the one-month window period that CAK has offered the public to file their objections or comments.
Safaricom has reached an agreement with the telecommunications sector regulator for the hiring of an independent firm to conduct a fresh quality of service study, paving the way for renewal of its operating licence.
The Communication Authority of Kenya (CAK) has been conducting the quality of service studies, which showed Safaricom and the other three main rivals performing below the minimum acceptable benchmarks.
The telcos have however been questioning the accuracy of CAK’s quality measures, which incidentally was a key requirement for renewal of Safaricom’s licence.
“We have been negotiating with the regulator for some time now (on renewal of the licence) and we reached an agreement on most of the conditions and in particular the quality of services where CAK is supposed to engage an independent firm to conduct fresh studies,” said Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore on Monday shortly after release of the company’s annual results.
Renewal of Safaricom’s licence is due next month, and CAK has already gazetted a request for any objections to the proposed renewal.
Safaricom is also expected to pay a renewal fee of Sh2.3 billion.
Mr Collymore said Safaricom expects to get formal approval of the licence before or on June 9, after the one-month window period that CAK has offered the public to file their objections or comments.
In January, CAK acknowledged that it lacked capacity to carry out the study continuously throughout the country, which resulted in conflicting results to those done independently by the operators.
CAK expects the operator to achieve a score of 80 per cent on eight indicators including speech quality, completed calls, call success rates, call drop rates call set up success rate, blocked calls, handover success rate, call set up time and signal strength.
Safaricom, Airtel and yuMobile tied on a score of 50 per cent in the year to June, while Telkom Kenya had a 62.5 per cent rating. Safaricom had failed to meet the quality standards over the past four years, CAK says.
The operator however reckoned that an independent assessor had given it a score of 87.5 per cent.
“In October 2013, we commissioned independent drive tests to measure key quality metrics such as dropped calls, voice quality and data speeds, these tests show that our network delivers the best data services and comparative voice services,” Mr Collymore said.
“We continue to focus on our “Best Network in Kenya” programme with Sh27.8 billion invested in the network during the year, our goal being to provide the best customer experience through improving our network quality, capacity and coverage.”
Safaricom has increased the population coverage of its 2G and 3G networks, completed network modernisation in six key cities and rolled out fibre to 50 per cent of its base stations in Nairobi.
This comes as the regulator raised penalties for operators in breach of quality standards to 0.2 per cent of the annual sales from a flat rate of Sh500, 000 —taking Safaricom’s fine to Sh250 million on last year’s revenues of Sh124 billion.
