Ever since Safaricom started offering mobile data bundles, one of the phrases you often hear is how Safaricom ‘eats your bundles’. This popular but often unsubstantiated claim comes from subscribers ‘feeling’ their data bundles get used up much faster than they expect. Its something that has bothered Safaricom subscribers for many years.

However, as someone who was there at the start of the Internet in Kenya, going back to 1995, time-based Internet was the order of the day when we had dial-up analogue Internet services. Back then, we connected to the Internet via ISPs like Africa Online using modems on Kenya Posts and Telecommunications Corporation’s or ‘KPTC’s’ public switched telephone network or ‘PSTN’.

The way that KPTC’s PSTN worked, or what we used to call ‘landlines’, is that it had a circuit-switched infrastructure of copper wires and switching centers to establish a dedicated path for each analogue phone call. Calls were completed by dialing a number, and a dedicated circuit would be established and then released after the call ended.

In order to get online, we had a modem that would be connected to your computer and in turn would be used to dial-up an Internet connection via KPTC’s PSTN to transmit and receive digital data to another modem at an ISP like Africa Online by converting it into analogue signals that could then be sent over traditional copper phone lines, and vice-versa.

So, ultimately, you had to pay for both the time you were dialed in via your modem on KPTC’s PSTN as well as for time you were connected to the modem on the other end of your Internet connection at the ISPs end. This was how it worked and the reality is that we often paid close attention to how much time we spent online.

So, when I look at Safaricom’s B-Live bundles, it feels like a return to the past as you can use as much data as you want depending on how fast your Internet connection is for the duration of the time-based bundle you purchase. This could be revolutionary as subscribers may finally never have to complain again about ‘Safaricom eating their bundles’ 🙂