Airtel Kenya expands network, 5G coming soon

To meet Kenya's growing demand for data services, telecommunications company Airtel has announced that it will be expanding its network in the East African country.

The telco's latest plans include expanding its network with 349 more sites added by the end of the year and an additional 300 sites set to be in the pipeline.

The company held a press conference in Nairobi on Tuesday and told journalists that its current network infrastructure spans over 3,200 sites, covering 89% of the country.

Furthermore, the network expansion initiative is to enhance connectivity and to improve service quality in the country.

The expansion drive will see the further deployment of LTE on the 2600Mhz band for capacity expansion.

"Our goal is not only to exceed customer expectations in the present but also to propel them into a future they have only begun to imagine," said Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel, Airtel Kenya's holding firm.

Airtel Kenya's network expansion is in line with the company paying US$40 million for additional spectrum in Kenya, to help accommodate strong data growth across its network in the East African nation.

Airtel Kenya 5G rollout

Along with its network expansion plans, the telco has also said that it was planning to roll out its super-fast fifth-generation (5G) mobile broadband network in July.

"We are not too far away from our launch of 5G services, sometime early next month. We are at the last lap of the launch of 5G services," Mittal continued.

On top of the rollout of 5G services, the telco also announced that it will also be launching voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) services, which will allow for high-quality voice calls over the LTE network.

Furthermore, the telco said it was working on lowering its carbon emissions by introducing lithium-ion batteries to its infrastructure, making its operations more environmentally friendly.

Airtel Kenya's expansion network and 5G announcements follow Safaricom, which was the first telco to deploy 5G services in Kenya in October 2022.

Additionally, Safaricom extended its services in 28 towns across Kenya's 21 counties in April 2023.

Kenya's mobile mix

Airtel Kenya had almost 18 million mobile users at the end of the first quarter of 2023, according to statistics from market research company Omdia, a sister company of Connecting Africa.

Airtel's market share in Kenya was about 27%, coming in behind market leader Safaricom, which controls 67% of the mobile market and had about 44.2 million mobile users.

Telkom Kenya remained well back in third place with almost 3.5 million mobile customers over the same period, with 5% market share. Jamii Telecommunications was fourth with just 361,000 subscribers and under 1% market share.

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*Top image source: jbdodane on Flickr CC 2.0

— Matshepo Sehloho, Associate Editor, Connecting Africa