While it does not happen all the time, Safaricom Home Fibre does go down some time.
Just try doing a basic search on platforms such as Twitter about Fibre being out and you will see two or more people complaining about the same.
That doesn’t mean that the service is bad; heck Home Fibre is the best in its class, and competitors cannot come close to it in terms of reliability – and more lately, coverage.
Now, we have always wanted to know what happens if your connection is experiencing an outage. It is very important that this question is asked because customers pay a lot of money for the service (and we have the Finance Bill and its many amendments to blame), hence would want to have a reliable service at all times.
In the past, all a customer had to do was wait for the carrier to fix a Fibre issue – and they were not reimbursed in any way, which is wrong because of lost time and work that could have been done were it not for an outage.
Now, it appears like Safaricom is testing a way that sees their customers access the internet if their Home Fibre connection is under.
If you call them, and customer care establishes that your area is experiencing an outage, then Safaricom will send you some data so you continue doing whatever you were engaged in.
So far, we have seen the carrier send 5 GB of data to affected customers.
It could be more – we are not sure yet of the manner the whole arrangement works – in line with the time the interruption is going to take.
In a way, this is a good way of ensuring that customers are not entirely disconnected once their Home Fibre is unstable or undergoing maintenance/fixes.
Could also this be a sign that the operator is making the product more appealing by assuring customers that they don’t have to worry if their connection is experiencing issues?
It is a big nod from us.