A report on Kenya’s telecommunication market, authored by the Communications Authority of Kenya, has revealed that only one telco realized the 80 percent key performance indicator minimum compliance threshold last year.
According to the quality of survey report on the country’s three legacy mobile operators, conducted under three components: End-to-End QoS, Network Performance QoS (NP), and Quality of Experience (QoE) assessment, Safaricom PLC attained this target by achieving an overall performance of 90% with Airtel Kenya Networks Kenya Limited and Telkom Kenya Limited posting an overall performance of 79% and 65% respectively against a target of 80%.
“Airtel Kenya and Telkom Kenya Networks failed to, not only meet their coverage targets, but a number of the most critical QoS KPIs, and particularly the “Unsuccessful Call Ratio” and Data Internet KPIs which is an indicator for coverage and internet availability/accessibility respectively.” Says the report.
Aging BTSs and Sparse deployment of BTS was cited as a major contributing factor to the failure by Airtel and Telkom Kenya to meet the KPI thresholds with the two operators showing good performance in urbanized areas while having below average coverage in rural areas and far-flung areas.
The report highlight results of the three components including End-to-End QoS, Network Performance (NP) QoS and Quality of Experience (QoE) assessment that was conducted through surveys, alongside the Customer Satisfaction and perception surveys.
Voice Telephony (Speech) parameters analyzed unsuccessful call ratio, dropped call ratio, call set up time, voice quality (MOS, POLQA) and handover.
Data parameters on local Websites and Common search engines like google looked at
latency (delays and buffering), data transfer failure ratio and throughput of successful data transfer, internet accessibility, HTTP set-up failure ratio and HTTP set-up time, HTTP Completion failure ratio and HTTP Completion Time as well as HTTP generic scenario availability.
SMS parameters measured successful SMS Ratio, completion Rate for SMS and End-to-End delivery time for SMS.
According to the regulator, the aspect of the market stratification and competition have continued to impact on the performance of Telkom Kenya and Airtel based on the understanding that quality of service is a product of market investment levels, the investment levels is a product of subscriber numbers and revenue generation, while market balance and consumer confidence/balance is a product of regulatory interventions.
The Authority has pledged to implement regulatory interventions that will balance the market and ensure success of the smaller players and help them to grow and compete effectively.
Sally Namuye
