Kenyan Internet users increased by 95.63 % in the last one year showing a tremendous growth in the country’s technology fuelled by high number of mobile phone usage, reveals the Communication Commission of Kenya, CCK, 2011/2012 sector report.
The report, 2nd quarter of 2011/2012, released today indicates the number of Internet users grew to 17.38 million as at December last year compared to 8.89 million users in the previous year.
This, compared to the previous quarter, represents a growth of 21.55 percent. CCK statistics indicated 14.3 million Internet users in the previous quarter.
CCK attributes the increase to intensified promotions on social media by mobile operators.
The use of internet has been on a rising trend, with the figure showing that 44.12 percent of the populations have access to the Internet with majority accessing internet through mobile phones.
According to the report, with the steady growth in mobile subscriptions, the growth in Internet usage is likely to continue as operators seek to leverage on new and emerging technologies to offer attractive packages aimed at garnering more subscribers to use this service.
Kenya has a high penetration of mobile phones standing at 71.3 percent with 28.08 million mobile subscriptions in the country up from 26.49 million subscriptions recorded during the previous quarter.
The report however shows the bandwidths in Kenya are underutilized. According to the CCK, international available bandwidth has increased more than 25-fold, from 202,720.02Mbps from December 2010 to 5,261,919Mbps in December 2011. The usage levels remain low with only 1.01 percent under utilization.
“This indicates that a lot of potential still lies in this sub-sector and initiatives towards formulating policies and projects that encourage the uptake of this capacity are required,” states the report.
The period saw the number of internet subscriptions rise to 6,152,687 Internet subscriptions from 5,422,009 during the previous period, representing a 13.48 per cent increase.
Broadband subscriptions increased to 131,829 from 126,589 recorded during the previous period. This represents an increase of 4.14 per cent. Broadband subscriptions represented 2.14 per cent of the total Internet subscriptions.
“Mobile data/Internet subscriptions on GPRS/EDGE and 3G recorded the highest portion of the total Internet/data subscriptions of 6.07 million subscriptions compared to 5.37 million subscriptions recorded during the previous period, which represents an increase of 13.04 per cent,” states the report
Fixed fiber subscriptions recorded an upward trend with a growth of 66.97 per cent during the period. Compared to the same period of the previous year, a growth of 337.43 per cent was recorded, which shows that the service is rapidly gaining ground and possibly consuming subscriptions from satellite service that have been on a declining trend.
Additionally, satellite subscriptions declined from 774 subscriptions in the previous period to 669 during the quarter under review. A reduction of 13.57 percent was recorded during the period as well as a 27.36 percent decline compared to the same period of the previous year.
