On Sunday, Safaricom recorded the highest data traffic ever as two major continental tournaments in Europe and America went into the final rounds. Hundreds of Kenyans opted to livestream these matches on their mobile phones and tablets, a factor that led to a surge in data usage to an all-time high.
This is according to disclosures by Safaricom, that indicated data traffic had peaked at 3.96 terabytes as Spain faced England in Berlin. It was the highest data traffic the company has ever recorded since its establishment 25 years ago. Safaricom divulged that massive investment in cable networks—particularly as pertain to reducing latency, or the delay before data transfer is begun—has paid off.
Safaricom’s Chief Technology and Information Officer, George Njuguna, expressed his excitement. This is very exciting for us, having no issues and no complaints as Kenyans streamed good quality football from overseas using the undersea cable network in which we have invested quite heavily,” said Njuguna.
For example, to give a magnitude of the data traffic, Safaricom marked that it would take about 100,000 phones at a capacity of 128 gigabytes each to store all data streamed through its network on that Sunday night.
Beginning this year, Safaricom’s international data throughput was at about 500 gigabytes, now at a capacity of 700 gigabytes. By this current position, Safaricom has six undersea cables—again, the largest network as compared to regional peers. Such a formidable network gives robust streaming capabilities, even for content residing in data centers off the continent.
“Anytime we’re streaming games, this information is coming from data centres that are outside the continent most of the time. So that means we have to have undersea cable network with enough capacity to carry because there are times and there are some networks that can’t stream on that, ” Njuguna explained.
Safaricom has been busy updating its network sites so that they do not get congested at times of high data use. The cables at the site are increasingly being connected to the content data networks built in Kenya by companies such as Google, Meta, and X. This enables stable network under heavy traffic and seamless streaming for users over the air.