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Telkom remains in regulator’s red zone over poor services
A subscriber holds a 4G Telkom SIM card in Nyeri town on September 1, 2020. Telkom Kenya remains in the regulator’s watch list over poor quality services.
Telkom Kenya has remained as the sole mobile network operator in the regulator’s watch list over poor quality services after Airtel Kenya enhanced its performance to attain the required threshold, a new report shows.
The Communications Authority of Kenya’s Quality of Service report for the year ended June 2024 shows that Airtel Kenya improved its mark to hit 83.3 percent from 79 percent attained in the previous year, surpassing the 80 percent threshold score of set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Telkom, on the other hand, posted a 67.6 percent score during the year under review, marking a marginal upgrade from 65 percent in the preceding year.
“Telkom Kenya Limited scored 67.6 percent and hence failed to meet the minimum KPI threshold of 80 percent,” wrote CA in the report.
Last year, the Authority had issued warning notices to both Telkom and Airtel for non-compliance with the set standards, after it emerged that only Safaricom had at the time met the threshold at a 90 percent score.
Safaricom's score has since declined to 88.1 percent, which partly contributed to a slow growth in the industry average from 72.3 percent in the year ending June 2023 to 73.5 percent during the review period.
CA arrives at an operator’s score by assessing three key parameters that include end-to-end quality of service that’s undertaken via drive and walk tests with the aid of a monitoring system; network performance that involves gathering and analysing the performance indicators; as well as quality of experience, which measures the overall acceptability of a service.
Among the testable indicators include dropped call ratios, call set up time, voice quality, data latency and transfer failure ratio as well as completion rate for SMS, among others.
During the review period, the regulator did not include Jamii Telecommunications Limited (JTL) in the assessment, noting that the firm commenced provision of mobile services after the establishment of the QoS monitoring framework.
In the preceding issue of the report, the CA had flagged ageing base transceiver stations and sparse deployment as the most likely contributing factor to the failure by Airtel and Telkom to meet the KPI thresholds.
Telkom’s woes had been worsened by a network disruption in June 2023 after the American Tower Corporation switched off its towers for failing to pay outstanding leasing fees.
The firm’s customer base has, in recent years, been on a sustained contraction. It blames this on a protracted shareholder transition that it says disrupted its business strategy and funding for key programmes, including network upgrades.
“Over the last two and a half years, Telkom has been going through a protracted shareholder transition that has resulted in the company’s inability to meet some of its strategic imperatives, regrettably affecting the optimal running of its network,” the firm told Business Daily in a recent interview.