By Dan Muhuni
Kenyan consumers are rightly excited that the mobile phone company Airtel, now owned by Bharti Airtel, has kicked off a price war with just announced unprecedented low and permanent new tariffs call rate to Sh1 for its subscribers within the network, Sh3 to call and Sh1.00 per SMS message to any mobile network in Kenya. This huge price reduction caused such a storm of traffic on Airtel’s network; they actually had connectivity problems with other mobile phone companies.
Safaricom, the dominant mobile phone company in Kenya, in other hand is owning up to the mobile phone tariff wars warning Kenyans that the tariff cut could cripple the whole mobile telephony industry in the country. Speaking in an exclusive interview with Dan Muhuni, the new Safaricom CEO, Mr Bob Collymore said its unheard off that our competitor is coming up with prices that we cannot afford to match up with. “to be sincere we have more that 13,000 employees in our call centres and we have some other employees who work with us and we cannot match up with what our competitor is offering since we have to pay our bills” added Collymore………………. more of this catch up with my weekly ICT column in your favourite newspaper…………….daniel@prestigekenya.com
