The past two weeks have not been the best for Safaricom after it was discovered that the operator had tucked away a key disclaimer in its updated Home Fibre’s T&C. According to the operator, Home Fibre customers can now enjoy increased speeds, following the doubling of the plans back in April after the pandemic kicked in.
For house keeping reasons, the new plans are as follows:
| Plan | Speeds (Mbps) | Price (KES) |
| Bronze | 8 | 2900 |
| Silver | 20 | 4000 |
| Gold | 40 | 6000 |
| Platinum | 100 | 12000 |
All good, right? But those adjustments are here at a price. Your usage will now be capped to a given number of GBs, after which your speeds are lowered so that others do not abuse the system. The plan is to make the product robust for all users. In another ink, the caps are here because some bad actors have been reselling the product to other users. So, the best way to kill that line of business is to introduce caps that, hopefully, will see them stop the vice.
If it sounds familiar, then you are right, because the carrier did the same thing to people with third-party data bundle resellers that were so notorious up to 2017 when the company deemed it fit to stem them out once and for good with a revised Sambaza bundle program. Now, you cannot do more than 10 MB of transfers, with a maximum of two transfers totalling 20 MB.
But we are not here to talk about that because that horse has been flogged enough times. And the decision has since been defended by all industry leaders in the fibre business.
Before we proceed, let’s refresh your mind about the caps:
| Plan | Speeds (Mbps) | Cap (GBs) | Speeds after cap (Mbps ) |
| Bronze | 8 | 500 | 1 |
| Silver | 20 | 1000 | 3 |
| Gold | 40 | 1000 | 3 |
| Platinum | 100 | 1000 | 3 |
Safaricom has made it easier to see your average monthly usage, which you can then gauge to determine the right plan for you. If you have been hitting more than the allocated data, then you will need to adjust your usage patterns if you want to maintain the full speeds. I know this will be a challenge for many, but that is the price you will have to pay for groups that have been misusing the product.
Here is how you check monthly usage:
- Open your phone app
- Dial *400#
- Select 0 for My Usage
- The next toast notification will show you how much data you use for a month, at average.
