Kenya’s largest telecommunications company Safaricom has introduced non-expiring data and voice bundles.
This comes a day after lawyer and ICT practitioner Adrian Kamotho dragged Safaricom, Telkom, Airtel to court over the expiry of data bundles.
Also on the list of respondents is the industry regulator, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA).
“That an order directing the respondents (Safaricom, Airtel, Telkom) to enable active subscribers to roll over used data at all times,” Kamotho says in the petition.
“Data bundles should not have an expiry date until used up‚ as long as the SIM card is active and the consumer keeps recharging,” he added.
In a swift response, Safaricom has introduced slightly expensive data, voice and sms bundles without expiry dates.
Customers will receive notifications when their bundle is almost depleted at 500MB, 75MB and 2MB.
For example, Sh3000 will get a Safaricom customer 15GB worth of bundles while Sh10,000 will earn them a 50GB non-expiring bundle.
All these options do not however come with the free WhatsApp bundles.
Expiring bundles of Sh3000 will earn a customer 25GB worth of data, Sh2000 will purchase 15GB data, Sh1000 will get a subscriber 5GB data, all with free WhatsApp data.
For the call and sms non expiring bundles, customers will earn 50 percent extra airtime for making local calls and sending SMS.
The extra airtime will earn subscribers Bonga points at the current conversion rate which is 1 Bonga point for every Sh10 used.
The option also allows customers to get non expiring bundles for other subscribers. They will be limited to 20MB per day.
In his suit, Kamotho sought to have subscribers transfer unused data to other users on the same network.
Last week the Ghanaian government ordered all telecommunication companies; MTN, Vodafone, Airtel Tigo and Glo too to stop the expiry of data and voice bundles purchased by consumers.
Similarly, the South African government issued a directive ordering operators to allow subscribers to roll over ‘expired’ data.
The state also barred operators from implementing out-of-bundle charges without customers’ consent, where customers’ airtime is used in case data bundles are depleted.
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