Kenya makes big leap into world of mobile telecoms

Lynn Wanjiku talks on her mobile phone. The rapid growth of m0bile telecommunication in Kenya has seen the rise of innovative mobile money transfer services like M-Pesa and increased penetration of the Internet. FILE 

By Okuttah Mark, mokuttah@ke.nationmedia.com

The combination of a changing global landscape and the ingenuity of its technology savvy population has put Kenya on the global map of connectivity.

Until the mid-1990s, Kenya stood among the nations with the least tele-density, where poor services were offered by a single state-controlled provider. In January 1993, for instance, Kenya had only 5,613 public payphones.

The Kenya Posts and Telecommunication Corporation (KP&TC) worked with Danida — the Danish government’s agency for international cooperation — to upgrade and expand the payphone service through purchase of about 3,500 modern coin payphones.

This cooperation gave Kenya its first card phones, adding a new dimension of convenience to the payphone service.

Liberalisation of the telecoms sector in 1998, however, saw the split of KP&TC into three entities — the Postal Corporation of Kenya, Telkom Kenya, and the Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK).

Public phone booths

That move was followed thereafter with the licensing of the first two mobile phone operators, Safaricom and Kencell (now Airtel), marking the beginning of the end of public phone booths.

Coin-operated phone booths that had dotted Kenya’s urban centres since the 1960s officially went obsolete in 2011. Thousands of people who worked as telephone exchange operators lost their jobs.

It did not help that consumers had within their reach community wireless payphones, known as Simu ya Jamii, where they could make calls.

Safaricom had partnered with South Africa’s Adtel to launch Simu ya Jamii geared to providing affordable communication solutions to consumers who did not have mobile handsets. 

To re-load the payphones, operators  deposited the required amount of money in the Adtel bank account then the customer service personnel remotely updated their account via an SMS.

Another provider Psitek of South Africa partnered with Safaricom and its rival at the time Celtel to offer community pay phone services under the brand name Jembi.

As the cost of handsets dropped and the mobile network operators widened their footprint, community pay phones began the journey of decline.

In the new era of wireless communication, all that consumers with a mobile handset needed was a scratch card to make a call. But the rapid growth remained encumbered by high call tariffs and the per minute billing regardless of whether a call lasted only a few seconds.

Safaricom changed all that when it introduced per second billing sparking a vicious marketing war with rival KenCell that lasted almost a year. The high Mobile Termination Rates (MTR) also had its role in slowing down mobile phone penetration.