Kenya’s Communications Authority released its annual Quality of Service assessment for FY2024-2025 on April 1, 2026. The verdict on Telkom Kenya is unambiguous: a score of 52.76%, against a compliance threshold of 80%, making it the worst-performing operator in the country’s mobile market by a margin of nearly 30 percentage points. The CA has enforcement powers that include fines scaled to revenue, directed remediation orders, and licence suspension. The more telling number, however, is not the score itself but the trajectory. In FY2023-24, Telkom scored 67.6%. It has deteriorated 14.84 percentage points in a single year, and it has failed the threshold for multiple consecutive cycles.
The collapse is visible in the sub-metrics. Telkom’s call drop rate is 6.86% against a 2% target — nearly three and a half times the permitted level. Data service availability stands at 73% against an 85% target. In drive tests across Kenya’s five regional clusters, Telkom met compliance standards in zero of five regions. Safaricom, at 89.72%, met all five. Airtel Kenya, barely compliant at 81.14%, met two. The gap between Kenya’s dominant operator and its weakest is not a margin; it is a different category of service provision entirely.
The industry-wide picture is also deteriorating. The sector average fell from 73.49% in FY2023-24 to 68% — below the 80% threshold itself. The CA attributes this to infrastructure investment not keeping pace with data demand growth: Kenya now has 58.5 million data subscriptions, up 27.3% year-on-year, on a network that has not grown proportionately. The CA’s own proposed new framework, out for consultation since January 2026, would raise the compliance threshold from 80% to 90% and shift from annual to quarterly assessments. For operators already failing the existing bar, the incoming tightening is a structural challenge.
How the score works
The CA’s QoS framework, in place since 2017, weights three components: end-to-end service performance from drive tests in the field accounts for 60% of the score; network performance data reported by operators covers 25%; and a customer satisfaction survey contributes the remaining 15%. The framework tests 21 parameters spanning three dimensions — accessibility (can a user initiate a connection?), retainability (can the connection be maintained?), and integrity (what is the actual quality of the connection established?). Specific metrics include call setup success rates, voice quality scores, data download and upload throughput, SMS delivery rates, and geographic coverage.
Failing the 80% composite score triggers formal compliance proceedings. The CA’s enforcement toolkit escalates from notice of violation — the regulator issued 207 such notices to licensees in Q2 FY2024-25 alone — through financial penalties of up to 0.2% of annual revenue per violation, directed remediation orders with mandatory monthly reporting, and ultimately licence suspension and revocation. The proposed new framework would multiply penalty exposure by applying fines on a county-by-county basis across all 47 counties, substantially increasing the financial cost of persistent non-compliance for a national operator.
The tower debt that broke the network
Telkom Kenya’s QoS collapse is not a mystery. Its proximate cause is documented: in 2023, American Tower Corporation disconnected approximately 900 of Telkom’s roughly 1,200 tower sites over KES 7.1 billion — approximately $55 million — in unpaid lease fees. Losing 75% of its tower infrastructure triggered a coverage collapse that the company has been unable to reverse. Telkom publicly acknowledged the disconnections, stating they “severely degraded its service in several parts of the country.”
The tower debt sits within a broader financial picture that has no near-term resolution. Telkom Kenya’s total declared debt is approximately KES 7.2 billion. It has no public accounts. Two collective bargaining agreements with the Communication Workers Union of Kenya (COWU-K) remain unimplemented, pending an investor arrival that has not materialised. In June 2025, union General Secretary Benson Okwaro issued a public warning: “Telkom Kenya is a national asset; unless immediate and deliberate interventions are undertaken, we are headed towards a national communications crisis.”
The subscriber numbers confirm the crisis is already under way. Telkom’s mobile subscriber base fell 40% in twelve months, from approximately 1.4 million in June 2024 to 868,788 by June 2025. That decline has pushed it from third to fourth place in Kenya’s mobile market, overtaken by Equitel, the mobile virtual network operator run by Equity Bank’s Finserve unit. Safaricom has 49.9 million subscribers. Airtel Kenya has 23.7 million. Telkom’s 868,000 subscribers represent roughly 1% of Kenya’s total mobile market.
A structural problem, not just a network problem
Telkom Kenya’s difficulties are not solely a function of its tower debt. They reflect a structural position that has weakened over two decades through a series of ownership transitions, a failed merger attempt, and an absence of the product differentiation that sustains market share in a competitive three-operator market.
France Telecom acquired a 51% stake for $390 million in 2007, rebranding the operator as Orange Kenya. By 2015, with Orange’s Africa strategy contracting, the stake was sold to London-based private equity firm Helios Investment Partners. A proposed merger with Airtel Kenya, announced in 2019 and intended to create a combined number-two operator capable of challenging Safaricom’s dominance, was blocked by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission and ultimately abandoned in 2020. In 2022, the Kenyan government bought out Helios’s 60% stake for KES 6.09 billion, making the state Telkom’s 100% owner. A subsequent transaction to bring in UAE-based Infrastructure Corporation of Africa LLC as a majority shareholder stalled and has not been completed.
Throughout this ownership carousel, Telkom never developed a viable mobile money product. T-Kash, its mobile financial services offering, has negligible market share against M-PESA and Airtel Money — the two platforms that collectively control over 99% of Kenya’s mobile money transactions. Mobile money is both the primary customer retention mechanism and the principal monetisation lever in Kenya’s mobile market. Its absence removes the tool most available to an operator trying to retain subscribers through a period of network degradation.
What Telkom still has
The one-sided market share picture obscures an asset base that retains strategic value independent of the retail mobile operation. Telkom Kenya holds 4,000 kilometres of terrestrial fibre infrastructure and maintains stakes and landing operations across five subsea cables: TEAMS, LION2, EASSy, DARE-1, and PEACE. It holds national spectrum licences. It operates data centre infrastructure.
These assets create two plausible scenarios for Telkom’s medium-term resolution. The first is an infrastructure acquisition: a buyer — potentially Safaricom, Airtel, or a specialist tower or fibre company — acquires the fibre and subsea cable assets while the mobile operation winds down. The mobile subscriber base has limited commercial value at 868,000 customers and falling; the infrastructure has scarcity value in a market where fibre and subsea access remain constrained. The second scenario is a government-directed conversion to a wholesale infrastructure provider, retaining Telkom as a national connectivity backbone operator rather than a retail mobile competitor. This path aligns with the union’s bailout demand and avoids the politically sensitive question of what happens to Telkom’s employees if the retail operation ceases.
Any resolution must first address the ATC tower debt. An acquirer inheriting Telkom’s liabilities without a settlement with American Tower Corporation inherits a network that is still partially offline. The KES 7.1 billion ATC obligation is the blocking variable in any transaction structure.
The CA’s QoS clock
For the Communications Authority, the latest report creates a procedural obligation. Telkom has failed the threshold. The CA’s framework requires enforcement proceedings. The regulator’s stated position — “this implies the need for more investment in network quality improvement to meet the increasing consumer demands” — is accurate but insufficient as a response to a 52.76% score when the threshold is 80%.
The proposed framework upgrade, moving to quarterly assessments with county-level penalty multiplication, would substantially accelerate the enforcement timeline for a non-compliant operator. Under quarterly reporting, Telkom would face formal enforcement review four times a year rather than once. Under county-level penalties, a single network failure across multiple counties triggers multiplied fines on a company that is already carrying KES 7.2 billion in declared debt and has not paid a tower lease bill in three years.
Kenya’s mobile penetration stands at 149.4%. Its smartphone penetration is 83.5%. The digital economy it is building on top of those numbers requires infrastructure that matches the ambition. One of its three major network operators cannot meet 60% of the service thresholds that the regulator itself set five years ago. The clock the CA is now running against Telkom is not merely regulatory procedure. It is the last formal mechanism before the market resolves the question itself.
