Safaricom Call Rates: Kenya’s leading telecommunications firm Safaricom has increased its voice, text and data prices. The increase follows the signing of a law that taxes airtime by President Uhuru Kenyatta. The law is part of the Finance Act 2021 which took effect on July 1.
Following the increase in Safaricom call rates, voice calls on the network will now be priced at Sh.4.87 per minute in peak hours and Sh.2.50 per minute in off peak hours. The calls were previously priced at Sh.3.50 and Sh.1.80 respectively per minute.
To send an SMS, Safaricom customers will now pay Sh. 1.20 from 87 cents. In addition, the cost of browsing using airtime (without bundles) will rise at a similar rate of change to voice calls. Safaricom’s consumer data bundle prices will however remain unchanged.
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On the FTTH front, the lowest bandwidth offer of 8 megabytes per second will now cost Sh. 2,999 while the premium (diamond package) 100 Mbps will cost Sh. 12,499.
Safaricom became the third telecommunications firm to revise its prices upwards after Airtel and Telkom increased their prices. However, voice, text and data prices are still cheaper on Airtel and Telkom. For example, Telkom Kenya revised its headline cost on voice to Sh.2.78 while the cost of sending an SMS was revised to Sh.1.15.
