Kenya currently has around 30.4 million mobile phone subscribers, indicating a 77.2 percent penetration, according to a telecommunications sector report released today by the country’s industry regulator the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK).
Internet subscriptions in the country also continue to increase, with the number of internet subscriptions rising to 8.5 million up from 7.7 million in the previous quarter, representing a 10.2 percent increase. This brings the number of Internet users in the country to nearly 13.53 million, with 34.2 per cent of the population accessing the Internet via the mobile phone.
Broadband subscriptions grew by 38.4 percent to about 1,006,000 subscriptions from some 726,800 subscriptions recorded during the previous period during the period under review.
According to CCK, the growth was accelerated by a promotion ran by one of the operators that offered reduced costs to handsets that have the capability to access 3G services.
The upward trend was also attributed to Kenya’s international internet connectivity (used) bandwidth, with the international internet used bandwidth recorded standing at 278,329 Mbps up from 264,584 Mbps recorded in the previous period, bringing the total available bandwidth in the country to 576,186 Mbps.
In the voice calls and short messaging sector, a total of 7.0 billion minutes of calls were made on the mobile networks up from 6.3 billion minutes recorded in the previous period representing an increase of 10.5 per cent. About 1 billion SMS text messages were sent in the quarter up from 986 million in the previous period representing a 10.1 per cent increase.
