Traditional fixed-line phones are nearly extinct in Kenya. Domestic fixed voice traffic collapsed 89.4% over the year, from 42.9 million minutes to just 4.5 million. Fixed-to-mobile calling specifically, once a large chunk of that traffic, fell 93.1%.
There are now only 6,085 fixed line subscriptions left in the entire country, alongside 1,669 fixed wireless voice lines and 55,240 managed VoIP lines, which grew 15.4% as businesses migrate their office phone systems onto internet-based voice services instead.
International fixed voice traffic showed mixed results. Incoming calls from abroad fell 7% year-on-year to 18.3 million minutes. In contrast, outgoing fixed-line calls grew 18.4% to 4.8 million minutes, while outgoing fixed VoIP traffic increased 4.5% to 2.2 million minutes.
READ: SMS Traffic Falls by 291 Million as Voice Calls Increase in Kenya
This suggests that the remaining international fixed voice traffic is increasingly shifting toward internet-based calls.
Fixed internet, meanwhile, is the opposite story. Fixed data and internet subscriptions grew 32.4% year on year to 2.84 million connections. Fiber optic is the biggest driver, growing 29.7% to 1.57 million subscriptions.
Satellite internet grew 54.4% to nearly 27,700 subscriptions, and “other” fixed technologies, mostly new radio-based rollouts from Airtel, Jamii Telecommunications, and Fiberlink, jumped 471.1% off a small base.
Most connections fall in the 2 to 10 Mbps and 10 to 30 Mbps speed tiers, with just 1,853 subscriptions nationwide reaching speeds above 1 Gbps.
Safaricom leads fixed data with a 36.1% market share, followed by Jamii Telecommunications at 19.1% and Wananchi Group at 10.4%.
Starlink Internet Services Kenya has already grabbed a 1% market share with 27,616 subscriptions, more than established players like Dimension Data Solutions East Africa.
There’s a curious wrinkle in the satellite numbers. While satellite subscriptions are rising, the country’s total available satellite bandwidth capacity actually fell 19.1% to 0.360 Gbps.
The report explains this as a migration from older VSAT satellite technology to newer low-earth-orbit systems like Starlink, which need far less bandwidth allocation per household to deliver a usable connection.
Kenya’s total available international bandwidth across undersea cables and satellite reached 28,950 Gbps, up 18.5% over the year, drawn from cable systems including SEACOM, TEAMS, EASSy, Lion2, DARE1, PEACE, and 2Africa.
DSL, the old copper-based broadband technology, has essentially died, down to just 23 subscriptions nationwide.
