A50 per cent reduction in fixed broadband installation costs, a full doubling of speeds across existing Home Fibre packages, and a deliberate commercial pivot toward Kenya's low-income urban settlements mark a fundamental shift in how Safaricom is approaching the fibre market — one the company frames not as incremental product adjustment but as a structural rethink of which customers it is actually building for.
Peter Ndegwa, Group Chief Executive Officer of Safaricom, was candid about the inadequacy of the status quo, saying the company's 32 per cent growth in fixed broadband customers and 12 per cent revenue increase in the last financial year, while encouraging in isolation, had made plain just how much of the market remained structurally untouched.
The scale of that untapped opportunity is considerable by Ndegwa's own reckoning: Safaricom currently holds between 33 and 35 per cent of the fixed broadband market and operates approximately 300,000 to 350,000 connections — in a country where an estimated eight million households have access to electricity, and where electricity penetration serves as a rough proxy for the viable addressable base for fixed internet.
The arithmetic is stark; even if the industry as a whole were to reach five million households, Ndegwa observed, the sector could triple in scale, yet the commercial model that most operators — Safaricom among them — had pursued was calibrated almost entirely to premium residential estates and customers already equipped with 4G and 5G devices.
The strategic pivot announced for the new financial year is premised on a simple conviction: that broadband is a universal need, not a premium amenity, and that Safaricom's infrastructure obligations extend to every segment of the population.
"We are not happy. The opportunity for broadband is much wider — we are still not providing the services that are needed for broadband across our customer base," said Ndegwa, Group Chief Executive Officer of Safaricom.
Three operational changes underpin the new approach. The first is the deployment of AI-driven network targeting — a shift away from expanding infrastructure reactively, in response to customer requests, toward proactively identifying communities based on population density, need, and latent demand.
The second is a fundamental restructuring of installation economics: Safaricom has adopted connectorised fibre technology, in which cables are pre-assembled in the factory and arrive on-site ready to plug in, eliminating the need for technicians to perform splicing on location and cutting the cost of delivering a fibre connection by 50 per cent.
The third is the product reset — retiring the 5 megabits per second entry-level tier, setting 15 Mbps as the new baseline, and doubling speeds across all existing packages, from 30 Mbps to 60 Mbps and upward, without passing the cost on to subscribers.
"We realised that the original offerings we had, on speeds of 5mbps just didn't make sense in the modern world of digital — people are streaming movies, they are doing all kinds of things," said Ndegwa. "So we said minimum speeds 15 Mbps at the basic level, and let's double all the other propositions we had."
The halved installation cost has been translated directly into a new consumer product, WiFi Bamba, targeting households that the previous pricing architecture had consistently excluded — including residents of the Affordable Housing Project in Mukuru, where deployment is already underway.
Beyond the fixed subscription model, Safaricom has also initiated trials of tokenised Wi-Fi access, enabling users in fibre-ready zones to purchase temporary, on-demand connectivity without committing to a monthly plan; Ndegwa described this as the fixed broadband equivalent of the company's mobile business logic, in which the goal is to serve every segment — budget, mid-tier, and premium — rather than optimising exclusively for the highest-paying cohort.
Taken together, the three-tier market segmentation strategy — premium estates on standard Home Fibre, middle-income households on mid-range packages, and lower-income residents on WiFi Bamba and tokenised access — represents the most comprehensive attempt Safaricom has made to treat fixed broadband as mass-market infrastructure.
On the question of competition from smaller, more agile fibre operators, Ndegwa was measured rather than dismissive, acknowledging that boutique providers had moved quickly and introduced genuine innovation into the market, but arguing that their geographic reach and capital base imposed structural limits on their ability to deliver consistent quality at national scale.
Safaricom's advantage, he suggested, lay precisely in its capacity to absorb those innovations, match the quality standards customers had come to expect, and deploy them across a network footprint that smaller players could not replicate — while extending that reach further through fixed wireless access in areas where fibre infrastructure had not yet arrived, using 5G, on which 30 per cent of Safaricom's sites are already active.
"We need to enable customers on something they already need rather than ask them to rely on their mobile, which is not the most efficient way of delivering broadband," said Ndegwa.
