Communications Authority: Airtel Kenya had the worst mobile cellular services in 2021
Eric Malesi, We hope you can now access your data package from Airtel. FILE PHOTO
Airtel Kenya had the worst mobile cellular services in the year to June 2021, a quality of service report by the industry regulator shows.
According to the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), Airtel Kenya was the worst service provider in the year to June 2021 despite posting the highest improvement among peers. Airtel posted a service quality score of 65.45percent last year, up from 52 percent the previous year.
The regulator has set an 80 percent service quality compliance threshold for the service providers.
The sharp improvement by Airtel Kenya may be linked to several improvements to its network to meet the regulatory minimum threshold on the quality of calls across the country.
Airtel Kenya Managing Director, Prasanta Das Sarma last year revealed that 270 sites were upgraded from 2G and 3G sites to 4G while more than 400 sites were added in upcountry towns and highways.
Some of the locations that benefited from the Airtel upgrade and installation of new sites include Kilifi, Marsabit, Bungoma, Nyeri, Siaya, Kakamega, Nyandarua, Turkana Bomet and Uasin Gishu.
The CA report shows that Telkom Kenya was the second-worst service provider in the year to June 2021. The quality of service by Telkom Kenya dipped to 67.5 percent last year from 73 percent in 2020—marking the only slump among cellular service providers in 2021.
“The authority monitors the quality of mobile cellular services provided by mobile network operators to ensure that consumers are protected. The authority monitored the quality of service for the three mobile network operators across 44 counties” CA said.
Kenya’s largest operator Safaricom retained its ranking as the best mobile service provider. In the year to June 2021, the telco posted a service quality score of 92.7 percent which is an improvement from 92 percent the previous year—making it the only compliant service provider.
Satisfying CA score is critical since telcos breaching requirements on quality of calls and other service outages as a result of omission on their part risk a fine of up to 0.2 per cent of their revenues, which could run into hundreds of millions.
The assessment is based on how an operator performs on eight key parameters as picked up in different parts of the country.
The eight include the call set-up time – the period between the end of dialing 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; call set-up success rate – the number of attempts to make a call that result in a connection to the dialed number; speech quality – clarity; drop call rates – phone call that is terminated by the network unexpectedly as a result of technical reasons.
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; and the strength of received signals are also considered in determining compliance.
