Finally, Orange joins Kenya’s mobile tariff bandwagon.
Well, looks like everyone is now on-board the mobile tariff (war) bandwagon that started last week after Zain dramatically lowered their call and SMS rates. In particular, after that announcement, YU immediately responded as did Safaricom earlier this week. Now, as of yesterday, Orange is the last mobile network to “hop on” with new reduced call and SMS rates.
Orange, as expected, finally announced a new low call rate of Kes. 2.00 per minute for Orange and Telkom Fixed calls. In addition, Orange also has a new low SMS rate of Kes. 1.00 for on-net messages. Lastly, Orange is offering FREE calls from 10.00 am to 5.00 pm on the Orange network for a fixed daily rate of Kes. 100.00 which is quite impressive by all measures.
So there you have it – we are in the middle of a full-scale mobile tariff war in Kenya and the irony is that there is no clear winner as all operator rates have now hit rock bottom. At the end of the day, its the subscribers who are winning, or so it seems? However, what I would really like to see is the same sort of aggressive price cuts for Internet services – this would really make things interesting as they are way too high at the moment.
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Lastly, Orange is offering FREE calls from 10.00 am to 5.00 pm on the Orange network for a fixed daily rate of Kes. 100.00
i think the Ksh 100 is a monthly rate not daily – but I could be wrong
@kuria – noted.
Just a slight correction, The new Orange tariff comes with an additional benefit of free calls from 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. for only Ksh 100 top up PER MONTH across all Orange networks such as Orange mobile, Orange wireless and Telkom Fixed (landline).
@kimani thanks for the clarification – noted! 🙂
Kimani is correct that the Orange “Free Calls” cost KES 100/month.
What Orange unfairly do not disclose in their ads is that the “Free” calls are capped at 100 minutes per day. It’s still a good number of minutes but it’s unfair and irresponsible for such a large respectable business not to disclose in their ads that these minutes are capped at 100.
BTW: If you pay KES 100 to get the 100 minutes per day, are they still FREE minutes :)…. hmmmm? This word FREE….
@sagini noted. I did that post in a hurry. Will correct it shortly. Thanks for the additional detail.
is there any service provider who has cut data rates? They all need to offer affordable unlimited monthly plans, eg kshs 1000 @ 128 kbps on their modems.
Kenya telecom operators need to be very careful here. Who in his/her senses would go into business by selling their products below cost. The party for consumers will be short lived. These are my predictions;
The new players Bharti, Yu and Orange will have unsustainable businesses within 2010 and in 2011 would not be suprised if the sell.
Safaricom had no choice bu to respond with their own reduction of tariffs, the alternative would have been a massive market share loss. They can tolerate these losses for about 2 to 3 years at which time the small operators would have perish from the Kenyan market. Tariffs will rise again.
Africa beware, these Indian operators have been able to play price wars in India and largly successful there because of their massive addressable market. Vendors were willing to offer them lower prices on equipment which cannot be transferred into Africa.