Ugrateful Kenyans. If it was upto celtel, you'd still be on per minute billing paying ksh 40 for a 10s dropped call. Are the regulations good for the consumer...yes! Are they bad for Safaricom Yes! Are they good for Zain,Yu and Orange? For the time being, yes!
Question is, if you were CCK, what would you do?
My take; CCK did what CCK had to do.
On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 6:45 AM, aki
<aki275@googlemail.com> wrote:
As I'm a self ban, I think you may find below interesting. :-)
CCK is not to be blamed for anything, infact it must be congratulated
for what it has done for the Telco sector. The politics that have
dominated affordability are the main cause of kenyans problems in the
telco sector but it is kenyans who pushed for it. In a recent study
done by an independent ( The article was published on the net, dont
have it bookmarked ) on Telcos, it was found that Zain was the best
performing network while Safaricom was the worst. Performance ratings
was based on call terminations, drops and other data based on the
actual networks.
In a nutshell, to understand the problem, we have to go back in time.
Celtel was establishing itself as a quality service provider while
Safaricom was also following suit. The rates were expensive and there
was a drive to ensure that affordability was key priority. At that
time, someone in Safaricom went the congested way to achieve the
maximum numbers on the exisiting infrastructure. For any services
running on a network, there are 2 possible business scenarios =
Quality or Congested Services. Quality is expensive while congested
services are much much cheaper but border very closely to
non-performance. Safaricom became the champion because it could now
drop prices on the congested model and now kenyans were happy that
finally mobile services were becoming affordable. Celtel was disliked
for not dropping rates but still offered the best network and customer
services. This would change later as the market indicators
confirmation was quantity not quality.
There was no need for CCK to intervene at any stage except when the
congested model got out of hand and voice services were affected.
Overall, it was working, though not to standards expected. Safaricom
saw serious growth with the model and would now exploit it further by
introducing short term tariffs and millions of Kenyans were moving
onto the network.
Question : Should CCK have intervened and clamped down on Safaricom to
adhere to quality , Like Celtel, or let Safaricom continue its journey
of serving millions of kenyans? If it did, it would seem like it was
going against popular opinions. I can write plenty of pages but will
keep it short.
Safaricom has done excellent work in its models and so has the CCK.
The kenyan telco market is way past fixing any problems because price
is king and the economics shows it will alway be about numbers with a
tiny tolerable margin of quality. The same applies for data services.
All operators are following this mode so if you ever expect any real
quality, sorry it is not going to happen anytime soon.
One negative impact I see of the new rules is that telcos will start
clamping down on services that are competing on its networks like
voip, chat, messenger and sms via internet due to narrowing margins. I
hope we are not going backwards...
Me thots.