Safaricom Home Fibre has been around for more than three years, and while it mostly works, the product has received its fair share of criticism. The reported cases of downtime, delayed installations, activations, or maintenance work have been increasing in the last couple of months. If you have used the services for some time, you should be aware that these issues started gaining momentum sometime in November or October 2018, and the carrier’s response to hundreds of complaints is a textbook PR narrative that we have come to expect, and do not address what happened to good speeds, or why it is so hard for the telco to admit fault.
Before we can examine what happened with speeds, it is worth noting that fibre-optic offers the best internet connections in the world. The same can be said for Home Fibre, which delivers impressive upload and download speeds (other ISPs are notoriously selfish with upload bandwidth). However, Fibre is only available in a handful of urban centres in Kenya, and in other rural towns, people are still relying on coax or telephone lines to access the net for their businesses.
Furthermore, Safaricom’s Home Fibre, among other competitors that offer fiber-optic-based connections are not available in many places because the installation process is expensive. Very few organizations have the capacity to roll out the product, but Safaricom, with its resources and astronomical profits, has the capacity to do so.
While I’m not certain about this, Safaricom Home Fibre had a handful of users at the beginning. Those customers were probably served with a dedicated link or dedicated internet access (DIA). Of course, it is costly to serve customers with DIA, but the mobile operator needed to onboard many people onto the product. I can report that those were good times: a 5 Mbps or 10 Mbps connection was more than enough, and could hit outstanding speeds at certain times. Right now, you cannot download and stream at the same time with those bandwidths: even a 20 Mbps is subject to the same limitations, and this rubs a lot of people wrongly considering the plans are quite pricey.
I understand why Safaricom Home Fibre is using a shared connection to its consumers. With DIA, it would mean Safaricom has or had to set aside a healthy budget to install dedicated fibre from the source to their location. In some cases, the connection is done among several organization locations. The cost of these exercises is expensive, and has, for a long time, made fibre optic services a luxury commodity for SMEs and many households.
@Safaricom_Care @SafaricomPLC Aki ninawasihi mtuekee home fibre hapa royal finesse kitengela the last fiber cable is 3kms away they're 30 units please ni ombi tu msikatae cc @bobcollymore 30 home faiba clients requesting! coz using this shared point to point connection HAPANA!
— Pain Nagato (@afrikandionysus) October 1, 2018
Hi Aces, apologies for the late response. Our Fibre to the home connection is shared. See more cont…
— Safaricom PLC (@SafaricomPLC) September 13, 2017
This is where the idea of a shared connection or shared fibre arose: Safaricom is obviously looking forward to lowering the cost of installation and access for all its target customers.
Shared Fibre
To begin with, Safaricom acknowledges Home Fibre is based on a shared connection as highlighted in the linked tweets above. The question comes up when new customers want to hop in, and want to know what they are getting into.
Shared fibre is based on Passive Optical Network (PON), which uses one strand of optical fibre to serve the internet needs of multiple customers in a big area. In DIA, one strand of the cable serves a single customer. In PON, the same strand can serve many clients and can go up to 32 in some cases.
The effectiveness of a shared connection is preceded by separating data and channel it to a predetermined station. According to experts, PON uses splitters that are unpowered to separate and gather optical signals. This is how data is moved from a single wire or strand to several endpoints. Less money and infrastructure are therefore needed when splitting fibre connections at households than dedicated connections.
Why it has been slow
In principle, a shared bandwidth, which is the basis of Home Fibre, implies that your 5 Mbps, 10 or 40 Mbps is split among all consumers and their devices. That is why download speeds hit a certain limit, or you can stream content up to a particular resolution (we did a piece regarding the plans, and what they are capable of).
Put differently, you have been experiencing good speeds because traffic on your shared connection is light.
If your flat is fully occupied, and your flat-mates are house zombies who hate the outside world and its inequalities – and are heavy internet users who stare at their devices all day and night, then your experience is going to deteriorate.
And what are you going to do? Call customer care, whose agents have a template of dealing with your frustrations.
The Home Fibre agent will acknowledge the call with pleasantries.
You will communicate your complaint.
He or she will ask you to perform a speed test.
Sometimes, he/she will ask if your router has a red blinking light indicating the loss of a signal. You will say, No.
The speed test will be fine, and you will ask why simple app updates on your phone are bringing speeds to a crawl.
And with no shame, the agent will suggest you upgrade your plan; and you will want to ask if he or she is going to split the bill, but Sunday School made an impact on you so you have remarkable manners, and will let the outrageous suggestion slide.
Afterward, you will suddenly realize calling customer care is mostly useless and terminate the call. Immediately, you will be notified via text to rate the call. The audacity!
Summary
The mode of a shared connection is not going to change, and speeds are going to fluctuate from time to time. Shared fibre exists for cost savings, and Home Fibre enforced the system as a business decision, and your hue and cry on social media does nothing to the fundamentals of the product. Therefore, you must be aware of this bitter fact and manage your expectations accordingly because slow speeds and occasional downtimes are going to need your rationality, else you compromise your happiness. Capisce?
On the bright side of things, shared fibre implies that the product can be availed to rural communities without Safaricom Home team fearing to spend a lot of money in installations. We are looking forward to that day when this will be a reality.
Good insights.
However, it is important to note that all home internet in Kenya is shared. Safaricom , which you are attacking offers the best ratio with a contention of 1:4, Zuku comes next with a contention of 1:8 and we have JTL giving you 1:10.
To the consumer this means that, using the Safaricom example, if you are subscribed to the 10mbps package you will experience speeds ranging from 2.5-10mbps, because there’s four of you sharing. This will be 1.25-10mbps on Zuku and 1-10mbps on JTL.
The issue with outages, having used and also having friends on these and other networks, Safaricom has offered the least cases of outages comparably.
I think consumers need to learn about a service and understand it fully before subscribing with unrealistic expectation that were never set by the provider from the onset.
We don’t have an excellent ISP in Kenya, but Safaricom comes close. Zuku have preferrential treatment, in that, their high end customers experience the best service and support whereas the low end customers could even go three days without their queries being addressed.
It is important for one to be informed first.
What a joke! You must be speaking of a different Zuku. Their CS is rude and literally does nothing. They ask you to share a screenshot of a *ethernet* speedtest over and over, claim to “reset” the connection and continue doing absolutely nothing. Continually promise that they will send someone out to fix it or call you back and literally never follow through. Their plans are more expensive for slower (claimed) speeds and its still on copper lines. They even had the audacity to claim multiple times that they offer parallel up/down and run fibre. What a joke of a company.
Well written article.
Now I understand why the Safaricom home fibre service has deteriorated of late. . Thanks for the insightful and we articulated info .
Well written and you seem to be informed. Criticism is very good however, I’m convinced that this article you actually used the Safaricom’s Home Internet to upload and that picture might be of your router. We have to however applaud the company for the strides it’s making to keep things going for us. Problems will always be there and can be fixed with time.
Used it since 2016 abd I can’t complain small issues here abd there but they always help so far am good [email protected]
Only utopian world is flawless
Safaricom Fibre is great so far
Let’s deal with what comes
I have zero issues with mine
So you want millions of fiber strand to run from olt to clients houses directly. Its not about 1 stand being used by 32 clients… Just remember the maximum size that can be loaded to 1 strand is 128 clients depending on distance of course. Bandwidth is the issue and sharing ration is the one you should write about. All this 128 clients on one strand can get upto 100 mbps down n up simultaneously if the bandwidth is there
Exactly , some people act technical but don’t actually properly understand what they are saying
Let’s forgive him because he is a child in this matters and doesn’t quite grasp what he is saying
The techies’ explanations as to why our fiber connections are lagging are all good, but one undeniable fact is the Safaricom Home is too expensive for for the terrible download speeds and downtimes. If trashy services are offered, there should be a corresponding lowering of charges.
I have been waiting for a connection since December 2018 and now September 2019 is almost over. I moved here in January and met a neighbour who had been promised installation in April 2018. The cable is 200m away but almost 2 years later, no installation has been done. I can’t comment on their speeds or services therefrom but with regards to installation and responses towards installation, they are absolutely terrible!
I recommend poa!internet .it is the best ISP with a speed of up to 4mbps , unlimited and very reliable
Good read!
Thanks for realizing that you know little 😉 and the little you know,you know it wrongly! Safaricom the BEST OPTION.
I’m going to throw out my home fibre router. I’m tired
We need to accept, no ISP can offer dedicated connection (DIA) to retail clients. They offer DIA to corporates in companies for hundreds of thousands a month, which retail would be able to pay that?
Perhaps it’s time retail clients tried buying fixed bundles without the 5 MBps bait nonsense. Do you know that if you got a real output of 5MBps you would be able to stream anything in this world? So the fact that they advertise 5MBps as a package for “Basic access to Email, web browsing access, access to social media” should already raise a red flag. You probably end up getting 300kbps after the connection is fully shared between multiple users!
I haven’t used safaricom home fibre because I’m aware of these facts but a simple calculation of their basic package shows I can be able to buy 72.5 GB of Jamii telkom’s faiba modem (1000bob=25GB) for the 2900/= you pay for Saf basic package. I doubt the guys on Saf basic can be able to download that much and most important point, JTL have no incentive to excessively share my connection because I bought a fixed bundle. Needless to say, the speeds on my JTL modem have been incredible so far, allows all the streaming I need and their coverage is good apart from remote areas where Safcom obviously wins. NB 1000bob=5GB fixed bundle on Saf while 1000bob=25GB on JTL!!
You should try their IFB, 5500 serves me well, very minimal downtime. Dedicated ip, down 7 up 7
First of all constructive criticism is good when the critique properly understand the subject, let’s start with the issue of bandwidth provisioning,
All network deployments whether in a data center or at the last mile are a shared resource someway somehow,what matters is have enough bandwidth resources been provisioned or not,the issue of running millions of fiber cores from a site/exchange is unrealistic and uneconomical ,even if it were to be so,the Olt or core switch is sharing it’s uplink bandwidth among all the downstream ports,I thank my friend who has already commented on the contention ratios, I would recommend you do enough research on what is known as oversubscription ratios, and critiquing PON technologies is somehow hilarious esp without understanding the nitty gritty,safaricom home has been engineered by professionals and Without a doubt what is advertised is what you get and it is what you pay for
And also they do an active Ethernet network,they run a fiber core from a nearby cell tower site,from a port of a core router ,to the customer,but it is expensive,very expensive…issue ni kuwacha story mingi na kufika bei
The issue of downtime is because when the FTTH started,most of the infrastructure was underground, and when and other underground activities such as road,water and sewerline construction occur,cables and ducts may be cut,however with all these challenges safaricom works with competent contractors such as Adrian,camusat,soliton,etc that do round the clock maintainance and use industry grade standards such as employing different SLAs to different service levels,for example 3-4hrs max to restore fiber cuts to all cell tower sites ,olt ports, and up to 24hrs max for problems at customer site that need visits
then on airtel its about 35gb
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