Safaricom more than doubles home fibre link

Safaricom has more than doubled the number of customers it has connected to its home fibre network to reach 297,885 households with about 107,762 of these made in 2019.

This comes in the wake of an aggressive roll-out that saw the telco lay out an additional 1,000 kilometres of fibre in the period, according to its latest annual report.

The firm says it has rolled out 6,700 kilometres of fibre that passed by 297,885 homes up from 141,700 the previous period.

The network expansion also saw Safaricom increase its fibre coverage to reach 2,400 businesses.

Its charges for the service are tiered with home customer pricing starting at Sh3,900 for a 5 megabits per second (Mbps) speed bundle and Sh5,000 entry price for small and medium enterprises.

“Part of our growth came with challenges including lower speeds due to large downloads and introduction of excise duty tax which necessitated a change in our pricing. We had infrastructure upgrades done in September and October of 2018 to provide additional capacity and address the challenges our home customers experienced,” said Safaricom in the report.

“We continue to increase usage through affordable tiered pricing. We see future opportunity in converged service of data, content, smart home and fixed mobile."

Latest data from the Communications Authority (CA) indicates that Safaricom increased its market share of fixed internet services for the seventh consecutive quarter to 31.5 percent, cutting the dominance of Zuku internet's parent company Wananchi Group.

The CA data covering up to March this year shows Safaricom’s market share jumped from 29.6 percent in the previous quarter while that of Wananchi dropped to 35 percent from 38 percent.

Safaricom has been making strides into Kenya’s living rooms over the past few years, expanding its presence beyond the mobile phone. The service is driven by the growing subscription of on-demand services like Iflix and Netflix.