Safaricom has appealed the decision by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) to slash mobile termination rates (MTR) by 87 per cent. You will soon know if your mobile phone bill will come down as a legal challenge over the proposal by the state to cut calling rates kicks off.
The Communications and Multimedia Appeals Tribunal will from tomorrow start hearing the case where Safaricom has appealed the decision by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) to slash mobile termination rates (MTR) by 87 per cent.
The review was expected to come into effect from January 1 but was delayed after Safaricom protested CA’s proposal to have operators charge each other Sh0.12 for local voice calls across their networks, down from the current Sh0.99
The leading telco accuses the regulator of flouting due process and using the wrong benchmark to come up with the proposed rates.
“The respondent (CA) adopted a procedure that was unreasonable and procedurally unfair in arriving at the impugned decision contrary to Article 47 of the Constitution as well as section 4 of the Fair Administrative Action Act, 2015,” says Safaricom in its appeal in part.
The telco further says the regulator did not provide it with the information, materials and evidence it used in determining the new rates that it says are based on false comparisons with other markets.
Airtel Kenya and Telkom Kenya have on their part welcomed the move by CA, terming it a step towards levelling the playing field that the two telcos have long argued is slanted in favour of Safaricom.
The two operators had earlier cited the calling party pays (CPP) arrangement as punitive to smaller telcos. CPP is a payment model in telephony that states that the total cost of a call is borne by the caller and not the receiver.
Airtel Kenya last year revealed that it pays up to Sh300 million per month to Safaricom for cross-network calls and asked the regulator to cut MTR to Sh0.15 to enable the telco to offer customers discounts like Safaricom and make profits.
If Implemented, the new rates will see Safaricom’s revenue from cross-network voice calls drop by 87.9 per cent, while Airtel Kenya and Telkom Kenya will see their payouts to their rival drop by the same margin.
The CA further says that Safaricom has in the past set calls at below the Sh0.99 mobile call termination rates in its promotions to customers to the detriment of competitors.“It […]