Internet penetration is rapidly growing in Kenya and now stands at a total of 26.1 million users. Statistics now put the East African country's internet penetration at 64.3%, up from 57.1% from the previous quarter.

According to the latest Communication Authority (CA) quarterly report for Q2, financial year 2014/2015 (October – December 2014), "the total number of data/internet subscriptions grew remarkably by 10.8% to reach 16.4 million from 14.8 million subscriptions reported last quarter."

Mobile broadband subscriptions also recorded a significant increase of 37.9% and currently stands at 4.07 million from 2.95 million subscriptions in the last quarter. This points to increased use of 3G enabled mobile smartphones and USB wireless modem use.

The report also stated that the fibre optic subscription grew by 15.9% to record 81,243 subscriptions from 70,115 subscriptions reported in the previous quarter.

For fixed wireless data connection, Wananchi Telecom held the highest market share at 48.8 % (55,936 subscriptions) with Liquid Telecom coming in second with 15.7% share (18,050 subscriptions). Telkom Kenya registered third with 10.5% (12,002 subscriptions) while AccessKenya came fourth with 10% (11,502 subscriptions).

"This [growth] could be attributed to the massive investments by mobile operators and Internet Service Providers into base stations and the last mile fibre optic transmission links to support the increasing bandwidth demand in the country," the report said.

"The evolution of advanced services such as e-government, e-commerce, e-learning and IPTV/Triple Play has resulted to increased demand for data/internet services," the report added.

With this development internet providers have deployed the WiMax technology and put up fibre to the homes (FTTH) and roped in more users through 3G mobile services to meet the demand.