By Macharia Kamau
Telkom-Kenya has lowered its wireless Internet access services in a bid to capture the low-end market and extend its reach to rural areas.
Subscribers using the pay-per-use Internet product will now pay Sh1 per minute to browse the Internet during the off peak hours (7pm-7am).
The price of the plug-and-play Internet modem has also gone down from Sh6,000 to Sh3,500.
Mr Jean-Michel Chanut, Head of Marketing and Strategy at Telkom Kenya said the revision of costs for the Orange Fixed Plus (formerly Telkom Wireless) prepaid connection represented a 40 per cent reduction in costs.
He said the new pricing places the company ahead of the pack as it already has infrastructure in place to allow Internet access from across the country.
"No other Internet service provider offers such a wide footprint for Internet connectivity and Orange Internet Wireless Access is now the most cost effective data service in the industry," he said.
The reduction on the prices follows a similar move by rival Safaricom, which recently reduced the price of its prepaid connection equipment from Sh9,999 to Sh5,999.
However, the strategy of pegging the amount of money paid by subscribers for Internet access is unlike that of Safaricom, whose charges for using its prepaid broadband services are fixed but determined by what package one chooses.
Host of applications
Zain has its prepaid Internet access determined by the amount of time one spends online and is billed on the pay-as-you-go basis.
The three operators are also banking on data access by subscribers through smart phones to increase their bottom lines.
Safaricom and Zain have the BlackBerry while Orange has the iPhone. Both phones allow users access to the Internet and a host of other applications.
