NAIROBI, Dec. 23 (Xinhua) -- Increased access to mobile network signals and exciting products offered by telcom operators continue to drive consumers to own more than one SIM card to take advantage of the diverse services pushing Kenya's mobile penetration to 112 percent, a report released Monday by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) shows.
The Sector Statistics Report covering July-September 2019 shows mobile subscriptions are on the upward trajectory, standing at 53.2 million.
Data shows that 2G and 3G networks cover about 96 and 93 percent of the population respectively.
In recent years, the regulator has also continued to put in place interventions to enhance access to communication services in various parts of the country including enforcement of operator's license obligations as well as licensing of additional frequencies that support mobile services.
According to the findings, the enhanced promotions and special on-voice offered by the telcom sector also pushed the local voice traffic originating from mobile networks between July to September to 17.8 billion from 16.2 billion minutes registered during the previous quarter.
Additionally, significant traffic emanated from roaming within the East African Community (EAC) especially from countries within the One Network Area (ONA) regime that are enjoying relatively low calling rates, with the bulk originating from Uganda, South Sudan and Rwanda.
The analysis shows that during the period under review, the number of active mobile money subscriptions and agents stood at 31.2 million and 235,168 respectively.
The period saw 661.6 million transactions undertaken, valued at over 1.7 trillion shillings (about 17 billion U.S. dollars).
Meanwhile, there were 425.3 million mobile commerce transactions valued at 16 billion U.S. dollars, while person-to-person transfers were valued at 6.6 billion U.S. dollars.
In the data/Internet segment, the total data/Internet subscriptions rose to 52.0 million between July-September from 49.9 million reported in the previous quarter.
Mobile data subscriptions accounted for 99.3 percent of total data subscriptions.
This positive indicator can be attributed to increased population coverage of 3G and 4G networks, availability of affordable smartphones and data plans, and increasing consumption of e-commerce, e-government, social media and other online content.
The study notes that the period also recorded a 14.2 percent increase in the total international internet bandwidth available in the country which increased to 5,374.02 Gbps from 4,707.0 Gbps recorded in the previous quarter.
The July-September period also saw a marginal decrease in cyber threat events, with 25.2 million events recorded by the National Kenya Computer Incident Response Team/Coordination Centre compared to 26.6 million cyber threat events detected in the preceding quarter.
A majority were malware, denial of distributed service, web application attacks and system vulnerabilities. Enditem
