Safaricom has revised its decision to terminate unused airtime, SMS credits and data of its Post Pay subscribers after May 26. This follows the uproar that followed Safaricom’s introduction of expiry dates on its Karibu Post-Pay service.
Read More: Safaricom introduces controversial expiry dates on its Post-pay tariff
Nonetheless, while Post pay subscribers will be able to keep their unused airtime, SMS and data bundles, any new products purchased under the tariff from May 1 henceforth will be expiring every 30 days. “All current (Karibu PostPay) subscribers will be able to continue enjoying their accumulated minutes and data until they are fully exhausted,” Sylvia Mulinge, the general manager for consumer business, said.
The Post-Pay tariff has over 150,000 subscribers. Some of the subscribers had threatened to sue Safaricom, with popular blogger Robert Alai announcing that he will be suing Safaricom. “How can what I have paid for expire?” asked the blogger in a Facebook post.
The Karibu Post-pay tariff was introduced in 2011 and currently has two price plans. For Sh1,000 per month, a subscriber gets 900 minutes talk time for calls within the Safaricom network, 100 minutes for off-net calls (to non-Safaricom lines), 100 megabytes (MB) of data and 100 on-net SMSes. For Sh2,500, they get 2,200 minutes for Safaricom-to-Safaricom calls, 300 minutes to rival networks, 250MB of data and 250 on-net text messages.
Any unused minutes, data and SMSes were rolled over to the next month when a fresh bundle was issued. Early adopters, therefore, accumulated tens of thousands of minutes, SMS units and data bundles, with a value estimated to be running up to hundreds of millions.