Orange Kenya’s “Niaje” Tariff and Safaricom Live
In the newspapers today, Orange Kenya has launched a new tariff, “Niaje”. The new tariff clearly demonstrates that Kenya’s mobile networks are not yet done with their “tariff wars”. Niaje has a very competitive per minute rate of Kes. 4.00 for both Orange to Orange calls and Orange to Telkom Kenya calls. It also costs only Kes. 8.00 per minute to call other mobile and fixed line networks in Kenya. Going forward, what remains to be seen is how Safaricom, Zain and YU will respond to the Niaje tariff but at the end of the day its the customer who wins with inexpensive call rates!
Also in the newspapers today are full page ads promoting Safaricom Live. Safaricom Live is Safaricom’s mobile content portal which has all sorts of downloads including ringtones, videos, wallpapers, games, etc. I had written about this service a couple of months back and was very concerned that Safaricom was basically competing with its value added services (VAS) partners – It seems to me that they are going full throttle (anyway) with Safaricom Live as a way of growing their data-based revenue. I tried getting into the service this morning, both on mobile and via my PC – It took ages to pull it up and timed out often! Looks like their subscribers are banging to get in and Safaricom may have underestimated online traffic after they ran the full page ads!
The Author
6 Comments
I thought Orange was 1 bob forever.
What are the TOS for the new tariff?
I think the best move by Orange yet. Just bought 5 sim cards for the office as a result of this announcement (service sucks @ Peponi center… has only 1 cashier who takes over 5 mins per customer!).
Will all networks be around 4/= per minute by end of the year?
Interesting developments, awaiting reactions from other players.
The timing must be hitting Zain hard, coming in just after Zain increased their cross-network charges to 12/= per min.
Great stuff.
I wonder where this safaricom live thing is headed, really. i have recently been experiencing slow internet connections and the data charges are still high.
we need some serious competition in mobile telephony and data services.
cheers,
George Gopal
[…] Orange Kenya’s “Niaje” Tariff and Safaricom Live […]
I like orange. They have interesting services like Gura – where your callers are told via sms of your new number when they call your old number after you move to orange. And that’s free! The only issue is that it would be so expensive for my friends to call me on Orange – and MPESA is useful!