Close to 20 million mobile telephone lines remained unregistered at the close of the deadline on Saturday midnight, according to data from the Communications Authority.
This is based on the authority's update which yesterday showed about 40 million people had met the deadline.
The number is about 61.6 per cent of the total mobile subscriptions as of June 2022, which CA quarter four data puts at 64.7 million.
Safaricom leads with 42.2 million subscribers, Airtel (17.4 million), Telkom (3.4 million), Finserve(Equitel) had 1.4 million while Jamii Telcom had 272,392 subscribers.
As of yesterday, Safaricom had registered about 93 per cent of its customers while Airtel had hit about 81 per cent, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CAK) said.
The numbers from Telkom are still under review but it had managed to register 40 per cent of its customers by Friday.
Those locked out have since Saturday not been able to operate on both voice calls, text and mobile money platforms.
According to CA director-general Ezra Chiloba, the process of analysing the number of those deregistered has kicked off, with full results expected in two weeks.
Chiloba noted that the level of compliance at Safaricom had risen from 55 per cent in January to 91 per cent, while that of Airtel stood at 81 from 40 percent in the same period.
“After suspending the registration exercise for six months, the exercise was concluded over the weekend and over 40 million subscribers have now adhered to the law,” he said.
Addressing the press in Naivasha during the ongoing Cyber security conference, Chiloba said the next stage will be the auditing of the unregistered numbers and those using them.
“Mobile phone operators are looking at those genuine cases that were not registered and there are no plans to extend the registration exercise,” he said.
The authority in April this year extended the deadline for subscribers to update their registration details by October 15.
Mobile operators deactivated 287,214 SIM cards in the three months to June 2022, which had been registered using the wrong identification details.
In the January-March 2022 quarter, 124,689 SIM cards were deactivated as part of efforts to mitigate misuse of SIM cards for criminal intentions.
With the deactivation, the active mobile subscriptions declined to 64.7 million in the June quarter, from 64.9 million in the preceding period, translating to a mobile penetration of 130.9 per cent.
As of June 2022, there were 59.7 million mobile devices connected to mobile networks, CA data shows, with feature phones and smartphones accounting for 32.9 and 26.8 million, respectively.
The penetration rates for feature phones and smartphones computed as a percentage of the total population were 66.6 and 54.3 per cent, respectively.
Chiloba yesterday said with the exercise done, it will help contain cases of fraud which were on the rise, mainly linked to prison facilities in the country.
“The current issue is on the number of SIM cards that an individual should have and this debate is going on among stakeholders in the communication sector,” he said.
