Safaricom leads Zuku on data

A Safaricom home fibre router. [Courtesy]

Safaricom has overtaken Wananchi Online’s Zuku as market leader in the fixed data segment. 

Data from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) indicates Safaricom’s fixed data customers jumped 25 per cent between March and June 2020 to stand at 207,398, giving the firm a 33.5 per cent market share. 

Zuku saw a 15 per cent increase in subscribers between March and June to stand at 201,605, translating to 32.5 per cent of the market.

The new statistics indicate the high demand for internet connectivity in the months following the outbreak of Covid-19 where millions of Kenyans were forced to work or study online owing to various restrictions.

At the same time, more than 90 per cent of the total 619,579 subscribers opted for fibre speeds of more than 2mbps connected to their homes and businesses, with 18 per cent of them asking for more than 20mbps.

Overall, consumers used up 132,397,651GB of mobile data between March and June, 19 per cent higher than was consumed in the previous quarter. 

Websites registered

Activity on the country’s domain registry also rose, with 4,355 companies and 30 institutions of higher learning registering websites under the .co.ke domain.

And despite the increased cases of cyber crime reported by various organisations during the period, data from CA paints a different picture.

“During the fourth quarter, the National Computer Incident Response Team detected 13.9 million cyber threat attempts, which was a 59.9 per cent decrease from the 34.6 million cyber threat attempts detected in the previous quarter,” the report said.

“This decrease was attributed to timely incident response mechanisms and increased endpoint security measures adopted to protect end user devices.” 

Kenya’s postal system, however, reported its worst quarter in recent history. The number of letters sent locally fell from 8.5 million to 3.5 million while international outgoing dropped from 865,000 to 332,000.