The reopening of schools after the December long holiday break had a toll on the revenue generated by telcos from text messages in relation to the first quarter of 2024. According to the latest statistics from the Communications Authority of Kenya, mobile short message service usage dropped by 4.3 percent.
The numbers also point to a drop in both on-net and off-net mobile SMS. On-net dropped 4.7 percent to 11.8 billion messages, while off-net decreased by 5.3 percent to 1.6 billion messages. This drop has been blamed on the end of the long school holiday and the close of the festive season.
The number of text messages sent per month per subscription also went down to an average of 65.8 messages during the quarter from 70.4 messages in the previous quarter. The decrease in the usage of SMS is thus linked, due to new consumption habits, to a users’ change towards more and more voice calls.
Voice traffic also jumped to 25.2 billion minutes in Q1 2024 from 23.6 billion minutes in Q4 2023, услed by a host of promotions and offers that made their way back to spur usage of voice calls. Term two dates had to be changed in view of the prolonged rainfall that caused flooding across the country.