Wananchi Group’s own Zuku has held the position of the top fixed data provider in the country but that has been under threat. Safaricom has been laying fibre aggresively for the last 3 years and they have been eating into their marketshare.
Safaricom Fiber growth has always been way higher than Zuku’s for the past few quarters. I had predicted last quarter that they will pass Zuku in Q1 2019-2020 and sure they did.
According to the lastest Sector Statistics from the Communications Authority, Safaricom is now the leading fixed data service provider.
Safaricom now has 154,603 subscriptions which is up 16,779 from the previous quarter. That huge jump in subscriber growth allowed it to top the fixed data subscriptions chart for the first time. In comparison, Wananchi Group now has 151,548 subscriptions which is up 5,199 from last quarter.
Safaricom has been growing at least 3-5 times faster than Zuku in the previous quarters which means that this lead will only widen in the future.
The rest of the fixed data subscription market is pretty much unchanged. Here is the list:
| Service Provider | Number of subscriptions | % market share |
|---|---|---|
| Safaricom Plc | 154,603 | 34.0 |
| Wananchi Group | 151,548 | 33.3 |
| Jamii Telecom | 66,572 | 14.6 |
| Poa Internet Kenya | 39,533 | 8.7 |
| Internet Solutions | 15,744 | 3.5 |
| Mawingu Networks | 10,055 | 2.2 |
| Liquid Telecom | 9,499 | 2.1 |
| Telkom Kenya | 4,744 | 1.0 |
| Frontier Optical | 555 | 0.1 |
| Other Fixed providers | 2,037 | 0.4 |
Also in the quarter under review, the total international internet bandwidth in the country increased by 14.2%. The total bandwidth available has risen to 5,374.02 Gbps up from 4,707.0 Gbps.
This has been attributed to the activation of the 2 x 100 G links of the EASSY cable which was done to meet the ever incresing demand.
SEACOM is still unchanged with an undersea capacity of 2,840 Gbps. TEAMS capacity rose by 42.5% to 1,000 Gbps while EASSY rose by 40.2% to 1,280 Gbps. Lion 2 recorded the least quarterly variation in available bandwidth with a total of 248.3 Gbps.
The toal utilized bandwidth als rose by 12.5% to 1,508.61 Gbps from 1,341.3 Gbps that was recorded in the previous quarter.
