Michael Joseph, CEO, Safaricom Ltd, has asked the government, specifically the licensing and regulatory commission, CCK to treat each operator equally and charge new players same fees Safaricom paid for their 3G licence, a whooping $25 million.

Its a nice thing that Safaricom has served us with all its might, while enjoying a monopoly and making a killing out of it. Safaricom has so far recovered their license fee and made more than enough profits from the users by over charging and in my view, we should let other players get easier terms since they have lesser subscribers and times have changed. Bandwidth is cheaper and more available too.

I really do not think its fair to the consumers not to allow the other players come in with easier terms because Safaricom will continue to control the prices.

As much as Safaricom has the best mobile internet service, its also the most expensive available. CCK, do us good by licensing other players and lets see where this takes our country.

Good job done by Seacom so far is commendable. So I take a moment to try and figure out who Seacom is and according to their website, “SEACOM is a Mauritian company owned 75% by African investors as a collaboration between East and Southern Africans and owns 100% of the SEA International Cable. A small group of Investors with proven access to both debt and equity, were selected specifically because they were not national telecommunications operators thus avoiding value chain interference by to separating the ownership of the asset from its use” That is good for PR. Just before that paragraph, there is a small chart of cable ownership and it leaves me wondering why Kenya and Tanzania has to own only 35% of the cable in our countries while Seacom owns the other 65%. Looking at all the other countries where Seacom is present, the country owns 100% of the cable.

I just have questions, why cant we be 100% owners? What are the direct implications on cost to the consumer for that? What were the ownership options and is it that we didnt have investors with the capacity or was it dictated or politically “arranged”?  So far, Seacom cant even release the list of ISPs buying bandwidth from them something that makes me even get more questions.