Going forward, telecom companies in Kenya must compensate customers whose services have been disrupted by their poor service delivery. The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) has issued draft new regulations requiring mobile phone operators Safaricom, Airtel and Telkom Kenya to compensate businesses and customers when network outages disrupt voice, data and text services. The draft regulations have been published for public comment and seek to compel the telecommunications providers to either pay or offer credit equivalent to the time users are without voice and SMS services.
What Does The New Regulation Say?
- The new rules are aimed at shielding millions of mobile phone clients from poor services related to network outages, including lack of internet connections.
- The regulator is permitted by law to sanction any telecommunications company that inconveniences customers through service interruptions as a result of omission on its part.
- An operator found in breach risks a fine of up to 0.2 percent of its revenues, which could run into hundreds of millions of shillings. Now, the regulator wants to include compensation to clients for mobile phone outages.
Kenya telcos compensate customers Kenya telcos compensate customers
- Licensees must develop and implement an outage credit policy in situations where service is unavailable due to system failure and not as a result of scheduled and publicised maintenance, emergency or natural disaster, say the draft rules.
- The policy will compensate subscribers or issue credit equivalent to usage over a similar period that outage lasted and compensate customers for each day that service has been unavailable.
- Compensation will be based on how much the operator charges per minute for calls and data.
- In 2019, Kenya had 55.2 million mobile phone subscribers who made 58.78 billion minutes of calls, up from 39.19 billion in 2015. Scheduled outages and those caused by factors beyond the control of an operator, technically known as force majeure, usually do not attract sanctions
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer