This should definitely rock the Internet service market and should have other ISP’s preparing their marketing teams to come up with new products.

This Barely a day after I posted about ISP’s not heating up the competition. I take my words back as Zuku have done just that with the introduction of bandwidth in double digits (Mbps) and a massive price drop.

Zuku who have share holding in TEAMs and available bandwidth from Seacom, have mentioned that they have 50Gb of bandwidth available to sell to the market compared to Access Kenya’s 10Gb, 5Gb from either fiber provider.

I am now surely looking forward to increased bandwidth and increased price drops in the coming months.

Its now been 6 months since Kenya finally went digital, and in these six months all I have seen is a gimmick – “Doubled your bandwidth for free”.

Dear ISP,

We are the customer! We are not stupid.

I have noted that there are only four major player in the industry at the moment – KDN, Access Kenya, Orange & Safaricom. They all provide the end user with internet access in one way or the other.

My main stress has been internet access for home users & SOHO’s

Safaricom - Safaricom’s main strength in the data market has without a doubt been the 3g modems that they have been selling for as little as 2000shs ($27). Almost everyone has a Safaricom line, and Safaricom banked in on this and started selling the 3g modems at a throw away price. They have provided bundles that are soft on everyone’s pocket in terms of cost of bundle but not usage. The more the use the more you pay. That is a major disadvantage as safaricom have really fast bandwidth and you may get carried away with your usage.

3g coverage is scattered and inconsistent. Safaricom customer support is extremely difficult to get through to.

Access Kenya – Access Kenya had always set their sights on corporate clients, but when the fiber was close to completion they decided to move into the home user market with the introduction of access @home. @home is a WiMax based connection that has a lot of connectivity issues once the base station you are connected to starts getting saturated. Why am I telling you this? Because Access Kenya are known to saturate their base stations. At 6000shs +VAT ($80) for 512kbp/128kbps  and an additional cost of equipment & installation at 15000shs +VAT ($200), the average home user would never go for this because its too steep.

Access Kenya will really need to up the ante if they want to get into the home market big time. They may have broken their customer targets 2 months earlier, but the home users that are connected to their service are an extreme minority.

Access Kenya @home support team is much better than that of the corporate team and beat any of their competition hands down at providing good support.

KDN – KDN have for long been corporate solution providers, providing service through WiMax. They came up with the much scanty butterfly product for individuals on the move. KDN are still focused to providing corporate solutions and not really in a hurry to move into the home market.

KDN support is a major fail and their recent two awards are nothing compared to their image. KDN really need to review their customer support & sales team and how they work.

Orange Kenya – When Orange was Telkom Kenya, they had been the BIG boys solely because they were the monopoly. That is in the past now, and Telkom Kenya is now Orange Kenya and they are trying to come back into the market with a bang. Orange are finally connected to TEAMS Fiber and speeds are blazing. Orange Kenya have the real vision towards broadband roll out to home users via old copper cables and the use of a livebox with inbuilt Wi-Fi. At 4000shs ($54) for 512kbps/256kbps and additional cost of 3500shs ($47) for the livebox, Orange Kenya have almost got it right, they need to reduce the costs further and increase the bandwidth. Most of us still have the traditional phone lines and would not mind moving onto the service

Orange Kenya have re-vamped their Customer support who at least answer their phones now, but who really need to be taught a lot more on their products. Technical team has also been really improved and downtimes are a thing of the past.

New Players

Tangerine Broadband – With what they have been advertising as – for as little as 649shs ($8), they have a sales team that do not know what they have for sale. Not much information means they have nothing to sell.

Zuku – Double play package providers, providing TV & broadband from wananchi online. At 4500shs ($60) and additional setup cost of 3000shs ($40) with free equipment, Zuku may just have the chance to sneak in front of the competition. What really puts Zuku off is the poor sales follow up and the poor support. Complaints of extremely slow speeds (6kbps-15kbps) are also plenty.

Now before you jump of your seat to run to your nearest Orange store, this new offer was made available for Orange home users in the UK.

Orange UK also introduced 4 new price plans starting from as little as £6.50 (Ksh 815) Per month. None of the plans are restricted or limited to data caps. As part of the new deal, Orange UK’s Home max package will include evening and weekend calls to UK landlines. Home Ultra, one of the new plans introduced, comes with an Orange Livebox wireless router that can connect upto 10 computers at a time. The package also enables the users to make calls to 30 countries ant any given time, this includes calls to UK landlines. Home Ultra costs from £10.50 (Ksh 1300) per month for postpaid users & £13.50 (Kshs 1700) for postpaid users.

This can not even be compared to the pricing structure available from any ISP within Kenya at the moment where 10 times less bandwidth – 256kb/s costs from about £21 (Kshs 2600), with no extras such as free minutes.

Kenyan ISP’s really need to review their strategies and encourage more users to get online locally on better connectivity options. One of the major hindrances to new users is the huge investments required for equipment followed by extremely unfair high pricing for minimal bandwidth.

The Internet has spread around the Globe like wildfire, and Africa has not been left out. Its now Africa’s turn more than ever to display its true potential, its Africa’s turn to showcase its whizz kids.

The need for local content is growing, with international content not meant for everyone due to drawbacks such as language barriers, differences in social and traditional values, and general usefulness of information, local content will cater for the exact needs of the audience looking for it.

Local content can also bring down Internet costs, by ISP’s providing access to users only to the local loop for local content delivery. This way the users are still informed about their surroundings and are able to keep up with what is happening around them and also communicate with other users online at cheaper costs.

Content does not just happen to come from anywhere, it needs to be created. With so much content coming in from developed countries, to be content providers in developing countries could be discouraged from moving forward with actually providing their content, simply because they would feel who will get to their content within the region.

To reverse the discouragement, these content providers need to be encouraged and ICTvillage.com are doing just that. ICTvillage in partnership with KDN have come up with a local content hub idea, a local digital village. For as little as 3000 shs ($40) a month (subject to terms and conditions) one can setup a digital village and provide access to free LOCAL INTERNET within their building enabling the users to perform the following tasks online for free:

• Send & receive Email
• Read local newspapers
• Visiting websites hosted in Kenya
• Download government content
• Make & receive phone calls (on-net)

This should spearhead a surge in local content development. To make this even more successful, local hosting charges should then also be revised and brought in line with those of developed countries where anyone from anywhere in the world can get hosting for as little as 750shs ($10) a month.

This is the opportunity web developers have been craving for, this is where they can now make their presence count as they target their websites to the intended audiences much easily and much faster, this is where geniuses will emerge and their work recognized online.

From what I have seen ICTvillage.com do have a a slight drawback as home users cannot quite take advantage of the service unless you happen to live in apartments that have been hooked up to the service. The service is open to schools, office buildings, government offices, restaurants, clubs and no mention of residential areas. Please do not forget residential areas make the large number of users for content.

As always your comments are welcomed, lets get a discussion going and see what else we can do to improve on local content.

Meanwhile I am off to get my site locally hosted (provided it not going to blow a hole in my pocket)

Come in fiber connectivity to Kenya (and the rest of Africa too) and ISP’s had started coming up with products for SOHO & home users, prior to the completion of the fiber ISP’s had started selling these products to the home user with promises of increased speeds and lowered charges.

Some ISP’s packaged too good to believe offers as bait and fished in quite a number of home users and SOHO users. For about 6 months these clients waited with anticipation to finally have INTERNET, something to use and take full advantage, but alas!! When the fiber was connected and bandwidth now in abundance, the ISP’s turned their backs on their clients.

ISP’s now had a different agenda – Here is what we propose to you, “our loyal clients” since we now have cheap bandwidth, we will in good faith “double your bandwidth” and since we need to recover our investments, we will not lower the costs.

Now to me, that is a definite raw deal, no matter what hot shot CEO of whatever large ISP says. Yes you invested, you invested in your business, to move forward. But does that mean you deny Kenyans to what they have waited for, for so long? Does it mean you make Kenya wait another 3-5 year from moving completely into the digital era? Have you people ever heard of making money and recovering investments on a turnover basis? I think not.

Example – KDN CEO Kai Wulf mentioned that he does not feel Kenya is ready for the Internet, simply because KDN has only sold 20% of their capacity and still continue to pay for the unused 80%. Now, why not lower your charges & reach the masses? Do you really think Kenya is not ready for the Internet? Think again! Ever since the arrival of Fiber, no one has got more users connected than Safaricom.

With lowered equipment costs, and provision of free data bundles, they have won the hearts of many. However these same users later complain on how they cannot take full advantage of the media on the Internet due to data capping. In turn data capping turns to be a really expensive affair.

Safaricom has at least 1million data subscribers, reach out to these people, provide them with broadband (reliable broadband) services for as little as 2,000shs ($30) a month, which would still be higher than the average charges in Europe, America & Asia . You get just 10% of these 1million subscribers and you are making 200million shs ($2.65million) a month.

Safaricom still works out really expensive, so as an ISP you would still have the competitive edge, yes my above estimation is just a rough indication and has not taken many other costs into consideration, but as typical Kenyan businessmen who are trying to recover investment FAST, you are making on the minimum a 300% markup on bandwidth.

It would be lovely to hear your views and thoughts out there, this has been a long standing debate. Please lets all share what we feel and do correct me where I am wrong.