Kenya’s telecommunications regulator is preparing to impose direct financial penalties on mobile network operators that fail to meet higher service quality standards, marking a significant shift in how the sector is held accountable for the quality of calls and data it delivers to consumers.
The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) published draft proposals on 27 May 2026 that move away from its previous approach of issuing warnings and compliance notices to operators in breach. The CA is seeking to raise the minimum performance score for telcos to 90% from the current 80%, while introducing quarterly penalties for non compliance.
“A licensee will be deemed compliant if they attain an aggregate of 90 percent or above. In the event of failure by a licensee, penalties and/or other sanctions will be applied per county and rollout obligations on a quarterly, or as may be varied from time to time in accordance with the Act.”
Under the proposed framework, operators will be evaluated against 38 service quality parameters nearly double the current 21 covering dropped calls, call setup times, internet browsing speeds, failed messages, and connection interruptions. Voice services will account for 50% of the compliance score and mobile data quality 45%. For the first time, 4G and 5G services including VoLTE and 5G voice performance will fall under formal compliance obligations, with standalone 5G networks required to maintain latency below 10 milliseconds.
Operators that breach quality thresholds risk fines of up to 0.2% of revenue per breach cycle. With quarterly assessments replacing the current annual review, persistent underperformers could accumulate multiple penalties within a single financial year.
Current performance figures show that none of the main operators would meet the proposed 90% bar today. In the CA’s latest quality of service assessment for the year ended June 2025, Safaricom scored 89.72% up from 88.1% the previous year while Airtel fell to 81.14% from 83.3%, and Telkom slid sharply to 52.76% from 67.6%. A broader quality of experience survey placed all four operators below 75%, with sector wide performance declining to 68% from 73.49% a year earlier, attributed to infrastructure being overstretched by surging smartphone use, video streaming, and enterprise connectivity demand.
The county level enforcement model is expected to increase compliance pressure in remote and underserved regions where network congestion and weak coverage remain persistent problems. Previous quality audits revealed major service disparities between urban centres and rural counties outside Nairobi, with industry players historically citing infrastructure costs, vandalism, electricity disruptions, and uneven rural returns as barriers to consistent nationwide performance.
The proposals are currently undergoing public participation. If adopted, they are widely expected to compel fresh network investment, particularly among mid-tier and smaller operators that have persistently fallen short of even the current lower threshold.
