Kenya - Telecoms, Mobile, Broadband and Forecasts

Kenya’s telecommunications and broadband market is set for a revolution with the arrival of the first ever fibre optic international submarine cable to the country’s shores in mid-2009, with at least two more expected to go live by 2010. Bandwidth prices had already fallen significantly following the liberalisation of international gateway and national backbone network provision in 2005, but they may now fall by more than 90% again, enabling cheaper tariffs for telephone calls and finally taking the Internet to the mass market.

The country’s incumbent fixed-line telco, Telkom Kenya, is revamping its infrastructure and services with fresh capital from new majority shareholder, France Telecom, and it has also re-entered the mobile market with a CDMA and a GSM network under the Orange brand.

A price war has characterised Kenya’s mobile market in 2008 and 2009, following the market entry of Orange and the fourth network, Econet Wireless Kenya, in which India’s Essar acquired a stake.

Subscriber growth is now forecast to slow over the coming years, and rapidly falling average revenue per user levels have driven one of the incumbents, Zain, deeper into negative earnings, leaving only the market leader, Safaricom, with a net profit, although reduced. Partly owned by Vodafone, Safaricom conducted a highly successful IPO in 2008.

The mobile operators are developing new revenue streams from 3G broadband services which are currently delivering up to 7.2Mb/s to subscribers. The other key area is mobile banking which has already surpassed the traditional banking sector in terms of users and carries 8% of the country’s GDP. With market penetration rates in Kenya’s broadband and traditional banking sector still extremely low, the mobile networks have an opportunity to relive the phenomenal growth rates seen in the voice sector in recent years.

A simplified and converged licensing regime introduced in 2008 has lowered barriers to market entry and increased competition by allowing operators to offer any kind of service in a technology- and service-neutral regulatory framework. Companies that started out as ISPs, such as AccessKenya, Africa Online, Kenya Data Networks (KDN) and Wananchi, are transforming themselves into second-tier telcos by rolling out national fibre backbones and wireless broadband access networks, offering converged voice, data and video/entertainment services. At least six major deployments of WiMAX technology are underway, and Telkom Kenya has also revamped its fixed-line ADSL broadband offering under the Orange brand.

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