Safaricom has seen a 70 per cent surge in data usage as people stay at home to curb the spread of the new coronavirus, the telco said on Tuesday.
The government closed schools and asked people to work from home where possible last month, after the nation reported its first case of the virus.
Confirmed cases have risen to 216 and additional restrictions, including a night-time curfew, have been imposed.
Safaricom, which is partly owned by South Africa’s Vodacom and Britain’s Vodafone, said mobile phone data usage had also jumped 35 per cent as users streamed movies, worked from home and used social media sites like Facebook.
The telco has also partnered with education content creators to provide free access to students.
Safaricom is working with Longhorn Publishers, Eneza Education and Viusasa to ensure children access educational content at home.
The company is one of the biggest providers of internet access in Kenya, supplying 300,000 homes with a fibre connection, and nearly all of the 47 million population with second, third and fourth generation mobile internet coverage.
It as so far laid out more than 6,700 kilometres of fibre in major towns.
Along with financial services platform M-Pesa, the data business has been one of the key drivers of earnings growth for Safaricom in recent years.
Its mobile internet is distributed through 5,300 base stations spread across the country delivering 3G and 4G mobile network to 87 per cent of the population.
The rest of the population accesses the network on 2G.
The Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed telco had 35.5 million subscribers as of December, latest Communication Authority data show, dominating the market which has a total of 54.5 million mobile subscriptions.
“The investment in improving, extending and modernizing the network over the years is paying off and we are able to carry the traffic and ensure that Kenyans remain connected through this period and beyond,” CEO Peter Ndegwa said.
