Back in February 2020, Safaricom announced that the new prefix numbers starting with 011 were available for subscribers in Kenya. The initial launch featured 0110 and 0111 prefix numbers and just the other day, the telco announced the addition of 0112,0113, 0114 and 0115 to the lineup.
Being the person that I am, I was among the first to get the initial batch of 0111 numbers. I couldn’t help myself and I thought the new prefix looked cool. However, the joy of having the new numbers quickly fizzled out as the early teething issues started to crop up. Teething Issues
At first, my line would randomly lose network connectivity, despite the fact that it showed network bars on my phone. People would try to call me and they would be notified that my phone was off – while it wasn’t. This was followed by issues with the 4G VoLTE connectivity.
The traditional Safaricom lines can activate or reactive VoLTE ( read this if you don’t know what VoLTE is ) at will through USSD *100*7# and selecting VoLTE from the menu. My new number could still access the same menu, however, trying to activate VoLTE would return an error that my SIM card is not 4G enabled.
To resolve the issue, Safaricom customer care advised that I do a SIM replacement and I did. Imagine my disappointment when the issues persisted. Eventually, my line had to be VoLTE activated from the backend in order for it to work (this was later resolved).
Yes, I know most people don’t even know what VoLTE, but those video calls are amazing and everyone should try it, anyway regardless of this, everything should work just as well on any new product as it did on the old ones. Unrecognizable Number
While having technical issues is one thing, of which Safaricom resolved all of them, there is another bigger issue that’s been persistent over the past 10 months and that’s systems and platforms that we use not recognizing the number.
At first, mainstream services such as Google and Uber didn’t recognize the 011 prefixes but this was quickly resolved within a few days after launch. Other services like Twitter, still have issues with the 011 prefixes to date. My recent experience with having my Twitter account locked , was due to an error on Twitter’s side that didn’t recognize my phone number as genuine.
If you thought it was only […]