The Communication Authority of Kenya (CA) has released its Quarterly Statistics Report that showed that the number of internet users in Kenya grew by 4.1% from 22.3 million (in the period between April and June 2014) to 23.2 million between July and September 2014. Growth of internet users by 1 Million is quite impressive if you ask me and I hope the numbers keep going up.
During this period, the number of mobile data/internet subscriptions rose by 5.9% from 13.9 Million to 14.7 Million. Considering there was no significant reduction in data costs during this period, a 5.9% increase in internet subscriptions is really promising.
According to the Communication Authority of Kenya, the number of mobile subscribers in the country rose to 32.8 million from 32.2 million. This represents a growth of just 1.6%. It is important to note that this number represents all registered mobile phones in Kenya. So if a person has four registered mobile phones, CA recognizes all of them and does not bundle them into one. In my opinion, CA should bundle all mobile phones owned by a particular individuals to give us the real number of people with Smartphones.
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Another point to note is that CA does not say how many of all those registered mobile phones are active.
Out of the 32.8 million mobile subscribers, 32.0 million are pre-paid users. This is a growth of 1.5% from 31.5 million users recorded the previous quarter. The number of post-paid subscribers grew by 7.1% from 665,697 to 712,894. Remember this growth happened after Safaricom had stopped registering new post-pay subscribers. It is a good idea Safaricom reversed its decision.
According to the report by CA, “Mobile voice traffic stood at 8.0 billion minutes up from7.3 billion minutes registered during the last quarter marking an increase of 9.0 percent during the period. Each subscriber made calls for an average of 81.9 minutes per month (2.7 minutes per day) compared to the previous quarter’s 79.3 minutes per month.”
The number of text message sent also increased by 1.2% from 6.8 to 6.9 billion. Keep in mind that the number of new mobile subscribers increased by 1.6%. The number of text messages sent is expected to reduce in the coming future as more people adopt messaging apps such as WhatsApp.
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Mobile money transfer subscribers grew by 1.4% from 26.6 million to 26.9 million. The number of active agents grew from 109,286 and 114,988, a growth of 5.2%.
