Airtel steps up data bundle price war

The telco price wars continues amid the complexity of the new tax measures effected by the Finance Act  2018 with Airtel now saying it is offering more data in its latest data bundle packages.

Custom duty on voice calls, SMS and data was raised by the new law, but this has not stopped the country’s telcos going head to head in a battle to attract customers.

In complying with the new tax measures, Safaricom became the first to announce an increment in services before Airtel and Telkom followed. But now, the wave of announcements has brought about new packages among the competing companies.

Days ago, Telkom announced new voice call, data and SMS packages, and Airtel has also followed suit with revised data bundles.

The second largest telco in Kenya has as its latest offering “more data and free WhatsApp.”

Airtel is banking on maximising on the demand for WhatsApp, with the Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE) revealing in February that around 12 million Kenyans use the online phone messaging platform.

It has therefore increased its data bundle pricing across the daily, weekly and monthly offering. Our numbers show that while in some cases it has not increased data by even a single MB, Airtel’s new data bundles offer between 11% and 100% more data bundles for the previous price.

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Airtel Kenya Managing Director Prasanta Das Sarma said, “Access to the internet has become universal and essential for all people and Airtel recognizes that offering affordable and quality internet access is key to enabling customers achieve more in their personal and business development. We are happy to introduce our revamped Amazing data bundle offerings that will also allow our customers to enjoy more data and free WhatsApp that does not eat into their bundles.”

New Airtel Data Bunldes

The new offering sees daily bundles of Ksh10, Ksh20, Ksh50 and Ksh99 offer data bundles of 40MB, 100MB, 400MB and 2GB respectively. Apart from the Ksh99 offering which has remained the same, the other options have seen an increase of 60%, 43% and 100% on data respectively.

In the weekly data bundles, a new offering of 6GB for Ksh500 has been introduced. The other bundles see an increase of 33% and 43%  on data for the Ksh50 and Ksh100 offerings respectively. The Ksh250 for 2GB weekly data bundle is unchanged.

For the monthly data bundle, Ksh300 earns you 1.5GB (50% increase), Ksh500 gets you 4GB (33% increase) and 10GB for Ksh1,000 (unchanged).

The other monthly offerings comprise 15GB for Ksh1,500 (unchanged), 25GB for Ksh 2,000 (25% increase) and 40GB for Ksh3,000 (11% increase).

All the new offerings grant free WhatsApp except the 40MB for Ksh10 daily bundle.

SEE ALSO : WHY SAFARICOM CUSTOMERS WILL PAY MORE FOR CALLS