Airtel Kenya announced a new tariff aimed at attracting social media users with the promise of uninterrupted access to their favourite social networks long after they’ve exhausted their daily, weekly or monthly bundle subscription.
The UnlimiNET tariff was made official yesterday morning at a press event in Nairobi as a culmination of the #NairobiRed campaign that the company had been running to highlight the woes that plague users when their data bundles run out while they’re in the middle of some serious social engagement online hence creating not only just everyday inconveniences but also moments of awkwardness depending on the situation one was in.
For between Ksh 50 and 1000, Airtel Kenya’s prepaid subscribers will be able to enjoy uninterrupted access to social media applications like Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter long after they’ve exhausted their bundles. That connection will however be capped at 256 kbps so it is not like you can eat your cake and still have it. Since the UnlimiNET tariff is a bundled service, for each of the three price tiers, Airtel Kenya subscribers will get voice (from 20 minutes daily to 400 minutes per month for calling to any network) as well as SMS (between 100 SMSs per day to 2000 SMSs per month to any mobile network in the country) in addition to data ranging from 100 MB daily to 2 GB monthly. Doubling the amount payable in each of the three tiers will see Airtel Kenya subscribers enjoy upto 3 times more data, voice (minutes) and SMS.
See the table below for all that information:
Want in on the UnlimiNET goodness? Dial *544# on your Airtel line right away and get going.
Since this is not a promotional tariff that will be gone after a short period (it is here to stay, it’s a permanent tariff), this brings some serious competition to the market at a time when Kenyans have resorted to using bundles mwitu clever means to beat what is usually seen as prohibitive data costs. Ksh 50 for instance will get you just 40 MB data on a competing network. The call rates as a result are also some of the lowest in the country at the moment. Whichever way you try to look at it, Ksh 1.70 per minute for cross-network calls is LOW! A key question to be asked is what happens to any unused minutes, data and texts? Are they left to accumulate and carried forward to the following day/week/month or do they simply expire? More questions: how will Airtel Kenya’s competitors respond to UnlimiNET? Since UnlimiNET is a permanent tariff, does this mean it is the end of the road for Airtel’s popular Club 20 offering?
Photo: Airtel
