Communications Authority of Kenya has released its latest sector statistics for the first quarter of the 2018/2019 financial year which is from July-September 2018. They have several types of subscriptions they track and one of them is fixed internet subscriptions.
From the latest report ending September of this year, CA recorded 59,380 terrestrial wireless data subscriptions, which is a massive 51.3% decrease compared to last quarter which stood at 122,037.
Such a huge drop was of interest and CA has the answer. It was attributed to the Authority issuing a guidance to Mawingu Networks to review its data on the number of Internet subscriptions in line with the official definition of an active subscription.
That move even affected Mawingu Networks numbers when you look at the number of subscriptions and total market share. As of July-September 2018, Mawingu Networks had 13,128 active subscribers compared to 77,772 subscriptions that was posted as of June 2018. This is a massive 83% drop quarter on quarter and now their market share is 3.8%, down from 21.1% last quarter.
The rest of the fixed data subscriptions was unaffected by this move. Wananchi Companies who own Zuku still has the biggest market share with 137,213 subscriptions (up from 112.155 last quarter), Safaricom is next with 96,608 subscriptions up from 78,204 and JTL rounds off the top three with 45,933 subscriptions up from 43,529 last quarter.
It is also important to note that fixed fiber data subscriptions rose by 21.7% quarter on quarter and it is a result of more deployment across the country. Interesting enough, Satellite data subscriptions also had an impressive 19.4% increase quarter on quarter but it is still quite low in comparison with a total of 1,391 subscriptions.
