Kenya’s Internet subscription rise, SMS traffic declines

Kenya's Internet subscription grew by 1.3 percent  to 13.3million users as of March 31 from 13.1m in December 2013, Communications Authority says.

Internet market mobile subscriptions rose by 1.3 per cent and continued to be the biggest contributor to the service representing 99 per cent of the subscriptions.

DSL and fibre optic subscriptions grew by 4.4 and 2.8 per cent respectively. Consequently, the number of estimated internet users increased by 1.9 per cent to reach 21.6 million compared to 21.2 million estimated during the last quarter.

Internet penetration stood 53.3 per cent up from 52.3 per cent during the preceding quarter. The number of broadband subscriptions increased marginally by 0.9 per cent to reach 1.44 million subscriptions from 1.43 million subscriptions recorded during the previous quarter.

During the year under review, Mobile money transfer demonstrated an upward trend of 0.9 per cent to record 26.2 million subscriptions from 26.0 million posted in the previous quarter.

Similarly, the number of money transfer agents increased by 10.6 per cent to stand at 103,660 agents.

"There was a recorded decline in local mobile voice traffic of 2.7 per cent to post 7.6 billion minutes down from 7.8 billion minutes recorded during the previous quarter. Moreover subscriber average minutes of use was recorded at 80.3 minutes per month compared to 84.1 minutes registered in the last quarter," says the report.

Similarly, SMS traffic declined by 1.0 per cent to reach 6.22 billion down from 6.28 billion messages sent during the preceding quarter. Thus, each subscriber sent out an average of 65.1 messages per month.