Airtel Kenya’s Quality of Service has been improving since 2020. In that period, the telco’s score has jumped by about 14% to reach the current level.
Unfortunately for Safaricom, Kenya’s largest telco by subscriber base, its performance has gone in the opposite direction. In 2020, the company boasted an impressive score of 95.68%, but today, that has dropped by 10% to 85.71%.
In 2018, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) introduced the Quality-of-Service Assessment Framework, setting the performance threshold at 80%.
For the assessment, the ICT regulatory body conducted a performance review of Airtel, Safaricom, and Telkom Kenya.
In the report, the authority noted, “Jamii Telecommunications Limited was not included in the QoS assessment, as it commenced provision of mobile services after the establishment of the QoS monitoring framework.”
The Kenyan Telco Industry Doesn’t Meet the Quality of Service Threshold
According to the latest report from the CA covering 2023/2024, the average countrywide drive test QoS performance was 73.49% for the period under review. This means, on average, the Kenyan telecommunications sector does not meet the QoS threshold.
With 76.2 million active mobile SIM subscriptions and a penetration rate of 145.3%, Kenya has only two telecommunication companies that meet the required service quality threshold.
Airtel at 80% and Safaricom at 86% make this list. Telkom performed poorly, registering a score of 55%.
The low QoS average is mirrored in the Quality of Experience (QoE) of consumers. CA’s consumer survey on QoE reveals a notable decline in customer satisfaction across Kenya’s top mobile networks.
While Safaricom still leads with a 77.6% overall consumer rating, this is a significant drop from its previous year’s rating of 89.4%. Similarly, Airtel’s rating fell to 69.7% from 87.2%, and Telkom Kenya saw its rating decrease to 64.2% from 84.8%.
During the period under review, the Authority conducted its assessment in all 47 counties. This was a change from the last assessment, where several counties were not covered, largely due to insecurity.
Telkom met the QoS threshold in only 3 out of 47 counties at 6.38%. Airtel met the service threshold in 24 out of 47 counties (51.06%), while Safaricom performed better, meeting the threshold in 30 out of 47 counties (63.83%).
