This is an announcement just made by Safaricom earlier this morning. From today midnight you wont be able to access the Safaricom unlimited data service introduced almost a year ago. This will be the case for those who wont have renewed by that time. If you wanna cling to it for as long as it lasts, you can renew your unlimited data anytime from now till then, and you will get full service till the kill button comes to life. This leaves Safaricom subscribers both on handsets and modems with the option of either timed browsing, daily limited bundles or the packaged data bundles.
This decision came after a consumer trends analysis where Safaricom cited overuse of the service by a few users who would stretch the service to the limit, leaving the rest of the users to share a limited service, the remainders. Safaricom, faced with this situation felt it better to get off the unlimited service altogether than give one that is substandard. It makes perfect business sense where profits are limited. Some two weeks ago, Bob Collymore had announced that they had resorted to throttling the unlimited internet package, with a thought on completely killing the service, well the day has finally arrived.
“As a business, we have found it necessary to focus our energies on providing quality data access to the majority of our internet users. This means that we have to sacrifice the provision of our unlimited bandwidth to a minority whose usage has had a negative impact on the overall data experience.” Mr. Collymore also noted that, “It has always been our position that unlimited internet offerings are better suited for a fixed broadband services such as fibre or Wimax. Since mobile broadband on 3G is designed as a shared resource, the greater the number of internet users at any point in time, the higher the levels of degradation in the quality of service.”
Meanwhile, am writing my opinion on this news in a post coming next.
