Telecom Lead Africa: Essar Telecom Kenya will invest directly in LTE / 4G network and skip 3G network.
Essar Telecom Kenya’ country manager Madhur Taneja said it is already too late to start investing in 3G infrastructure when the rest of the world is moving to 4G.
He said the company will instead save costs on the third generation investment and participate in the LTE consortium which will be working with the government.
“If 3G will only be here for a short while, we would rather skip the generation and put our money were the future is,” Taneja said.
Essar is the only operator that has not yet put up a 3G network in Kenya.
Recently, a CCK report said that Essar Telecom Kenya posted the highest growth of 14.5 percent, representing growth of 324,284 new subscriptions. The highest gain in absolute values was recorded as 386,777 new subscriptions by Safaricom which represented a quarterly growth of 2.1 percent while in percentage terms, Telekom Kenya and Airtel Networks Kenya gained 209,447 and 210,370 new subscriptions representing 7.2 percent and 4.9 percent growth, respectively during the period.
In terms of market share by subscription, Essar Telecom Kenya gained the largest market share (0.8 percentage points), followed by Telkom Kenya – Orange (0.3 percentage points) and Airtel Networks Kenya Limited (0.1 percentage points). Thus, at the end of the quarter, market shares by subscription for Airtel, Telkom (Orange) and Essar stood at 15.3 per cent, 10.6 per cent and 8.7 per cent.
