Kenya’s telecoms regulator is pushing to raise the service quality bar to 90%, putting Safaricom, Airtel, and Telkom at risk of steeper fines and county-level penalties as the drive intensifies for stronger network performance across the country.
According to the Business Daily, Safaricom PLC, Airtel, and Telkom Kenya could face higher fines if the Communications Authority's proposal to lift the quality of service compliance threshold to nine-tenths is adopted.
The regulator is reviewing the framework used to measure mobile network performance and wants assessments done quarterly instead of once a year, with testing expanded to 38 service quality measures from 21.
The proposal, now under public participation, also introduces county-level enforcement, meaning penalties and other sanctions could apply per county alongside rollout obligations.
The stakes are material because operators that breach quality rules for call performance and service outages linked to their omissions risk fines of up to 0.2 percent of revenue.
Under the proposed 90 percent bar, none of the main operators would have met the mark based on the latest quality of service report cited, where Safaricom scored 85.71 percent for the year to June 2024, Airtel scored 79.74 percent, and Telkom scored 55.02 percent.
For the year to June 2025, the regulator has published a quality of experience survey that places Safaricom at 70 percent, Airtel at 68.4 percent, Telkom at 60 percent, and Jamii Telkom at 58.8 percent.
The score is built from end-to-end service performance at 60 percent, network performance at 25 percent, and customer experience at 15 percent.
End-to-end performance captures what users actually feel on the network, including call completion, data speeds, dropped calls and connection delays.
Network performance measures coverage availability across regions, while customer experience is assessed through surveys on billing, complaints handling and support.
The proposed regime also shifts enforcement from national averages to county outcomes and brings 4G and 5G services into the compliance net, including VoLTE and 5G voice performance.
“It is proposed to raise the threshold for compliance from 80 percent to 90 percent,” the Communications Authority said in its draft framework. The regulator added that, “in the event of failure by a licensee, penalties and/or other sanctions will be applied per country in accordance with the Act.”
For operators, the proposals revive familiar pressure points. In 2024, the Communications Authority warned Airtel and Telkom Kenya over poor service quality, citing high unsuccessful call ratios and weak data performance.
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