Telecommunications firms in Kenya, including Safaricom, Airtel, and Telkom Kenya, face higher penalties if a proposal by the industry regulator to raise the service quality threshold to 90 percent and introduce county-level assessments is approved.
The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) is reviewing the mobile network operators’ quality of service framework, which is used to gauge compliance, to set a higher service quality threshold compared to the present 80 percent.
The proposed new framework, currently undergoing public participation, also increases the frequency of assessment from once a year to quarterly, exposing the telecoms operators to higher penalties for non-compliance. The operators would be tested on 38 service quality matrices, way more than the present 21.
“It is proposed to raise the threshold for compliance from 80 percent to 90 percent. A licensee will be deemed compliant if they attain an aggregate of 90 percent or above,” said the regulator in a new proposal.
“In the event of failure by a licensee, penalties and/or other sanctions will be applied per county and rollout obligations on a quarterly, or as may be varied from time to time in accordance with the Act.”
Satisfying the CA score is critical since telecoms operators breaching requirements on the quality of calls and other service outages as a result of omission on their part risk a fine of up to 0.2 percent of their revenues, which could run into hundreds of millions of shillings.
Under this new regime, all the operators would have been forced to pay fines for non-compliance as none of them attained the 90 percent score, based on the last quality of service (QoS) report published by the regulator.
In the year to June 2024, Safaricom led the quality of service scores with 85.71 percent, followed by Airtel at 79.74 percent. Telkom had the least score at 55.02 percent.
For the year to June 2025, the regulator has only published the quality of experience survey report, which shows Safaricom is ahead with a score of 70 percent, followed by Airtel with 68.4 percent, Telkom with 60 percent, and Jamii Telkoms with 58.8 percent.
The quality of service score is obtained using three main metrics: end-to-end (E2E) service performance, which contributes to 60 percent of the score; network performance, which contributes 25 percent; and quality of experience by customers, which gives them 15 percent.
E2E measures how users experience the quality of coverage through factors such as call completion rates, internet and data speeds, frequency of call drops, and delays in internet connections, among others.
Network performance measures coverage issues, such as cell reception availability in different regions across the country.
Quality of experience is measured through periodical surveys, which assess how satisfied customers are with telecoms operators’ services, billing, complaints handling, and customer support services.
Under the current regime, operators are assessed annually and are deemed compliant if they attain an aggregate score of at least 80 percent. This is rising to 90 percent, leaving the operators with a smaller margin for error.
Further, failure will no longer be assessed only at a national level. Penalties may now be applied on a county-by-county basis, meaning operators could be sanctioned for persistent poor performance in specific regions even if their overall national score appears healthy.
Each of the QoS metrics has also been assigned more key performance indicators, increasing the burden of compliance for the operators and boosting the service quality for users.
For Kenyan consumers, the shift is intended to translate into more reliable everyday services rather than abstract network promises.
The regulator is moving away from a regulatory approach that heavily emphasised network coverage, which is essentially whether a signal exists, towards one that prioritises real user experience.
This means dropped calls, slow call setup times, stalled data sessions, and poor internet responsiveness will now matter far more than before. A strong signal alone will no longer compensate for congested networks or unstable connections, particularly in busy urban areas where expectations are higher and usage is heavier.
The framework also formally brings 4G and 5G into the regulatory spotlight. For the first time, operators will be measured against defined performance targets for technologies such as VoLTE (voice over 4G) and 5G voice services.
For telecoms operators, this represents a shift in regulatory pressure. Past investments focused heavily on expanding coverage footprints, often prioritising the number of base stations or geographic reach.
But under the new framework, optimisation will be just as important as expansion. Operators will need to invest more in managing congestion, improving handovers between cells, stabilising voice services on 4G, and ensuring data sessions do not drop under load.
The regulator assesses aspects such as the call set-up time – the period between the end of dialling of a telephone call and the start of voice or data transmission; completion of calls – the number of calls that are completed on a network satisfactorily compared to the total number of call attempts made by callers; and call set-up success rate – the number of attempts to make a call that result in a connection to the dialed number.
It also reviews speech quality – clarity; drop call rates – a phone call that is terminated by the network unexpectedly as a result of technical reasons; and call handover success rate – when a mobile handset moves out of one cell to the next and is handed over automatically from the base station of the first cell to that of the next with no discernible delay.
