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Telecoms firm, Airtel Kenya, has ramped up network upgrades across the country, after failing to meet the regulatory minimum threshold of 80% on quality of calls, which was going to see them fined should there be no improvement.
According to a Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) report, over the last seven months, the company upgraded over 600 network sites located in rural and urban centres and added over 400 new sites in 20 counties.
Commenting, Airtel Kenya Managing Director, Prasanta Das Sarma, said that 270 sites in 12 counties were upgraded from 2G and 3G sites to 4G while more than 400 sites were added in upcountry towns and highways.
“In total, the upgrade covered 20 counties. Some more sites will be added by the end of April when the work will be done. We are vindicated when we see more customers using us. With this kind of expansion, we will be able to satisfy CA criteria (on voice quality),” said Sarma.
The CA report noted that Airtel Kenya scored 52% on the quality of voice calls made across the country, making it the lowest after Safaricom (92%) and Telkom Kenya 73%.
In Kenya, breaching requirements on quality of calls and other service outages as a result of omission on their part risk a fine of up to 0.2% of telcos revenues, which could run into hundreds of millions.
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