The Communications Authority has slashed call rates in Kenya for the first time in six years. This heralds the dawn of cheaper calls which Kenyans will begin to enjoy from January 2022. The authority cut the rate mobile phone operators charge each other for interconnecting customers by Sh. 0.87 which was equivalent to 87.7 per cent.
This saw the charges commonly referred to as mobile termination rate (MTR)fall from Sh. 0.99 to Sh. 0.12 to match shifts in technology that have made mobile telephony more efficient.
“Consumers will enjoy lower calling rates following the review. The review was founded on the recognition that higher MTRs mean higher calling rates for consumers,” CA director-general Ezra Chiloba. “At the retail level, consumers will now enjoy access to a variety of affordable services across networks and at the wholesale level operators will have more price flexibility when developing innovative and affordable products.”
Currently, Airtel charges Sh. 2.78 to make calls to other networks per minute while Safaricom and Telkom charge Sh. 4.87 per minute and Sh. 4.30 to call rival networks respectively.
The mobile termination rate was in 2012 cut to Sh. 1.44 per minute from Sh. 2.21. It was then slashed to Sh. 0.99 in 2015. In 2011, the government stopped further cuts after operators complained that their business was under threat from sliding revenues.
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It is now expected that the cut in rates will spark a price competition among leading telecommunication firms that could benefit the consumer. Airtel and Telkom have been calling for a review of the rates. They have also been urging the CA to declare Safaricom as the dominant player in the market. Current data from CA shows that Safaricom’s share of the voice market grew to 69.2 percent in the three months to December from 64.7 percent in September. Airtel’s share of the voice market dropped to 28.5 percent in the period under review from 32.1 percent in September while Telkom Kenya’s share fell to 2.2 percent from three percent.
