Telkom Kenya has launched Free Zones for its pre-paid voice customers, where they will be able to make free calls, all day and all night, with no conditions.
The company will have its pilot free zones in Nyanza region – Kisumu, Siaya, Homabay and South Nyanza. Other Free Zone areas include Machakos, Muranga, Nyahururu, Eldoret, Cherangany and Turbo – with more zones to be announced soon.
“Our customers remain at the heart of what we do and we are always excited to give them a stronger value proposition. The introduction of the Telkom Free Zones targets to provide customers with more opportunity to communicate, while at the same time getting to enjoy our network quality,” said Amer Atwi, the MD of Telkom’s Mobile Division.
In order to use the service, subscribers will have to recharge their lines with Ksh50, without necessarily subscribing to a specific offer or bundle.
While in these designated areas, Telkom-to-Telkom calls will be automatically free. Calls made to other networks will still be charged at the prevailing Pay As You Go (PAYG) rate of Ksh3.30 per minute.
Text messages sent across the network will be charged at Ksh 1.10 per SMS.
To find out if they are in a Telkom Free Zone a Telkom customer will need to dial *888#.
According to the sector report by the Communication Authority of Kenya (CA) in the third quarter of 2018, there are 46.6 million mobile subscriptions in the country.
Of these, Telkom enjoys a 9 per cent share (almost 4.2 million subscriptions).
Safaricom market share for mobile subscriptions dropped by 1.2 per centage points during the quarter to stand at 64.2 per cent whereas Airtel Networks Limited gained 0.9 percentage points to post a market share of 22.3 percent.
Telkom gained 0.01 to record a market share of 9.0.
Currently, the telco, which is the third largest in the country is offering potential customers free lines in a bid to strengthen its customer base.
Telkom recently signed a loan agreement worth Ksh4.1 billion with the European Investment Bank (EIB). The company says it will use the funds to expand its coverage and capacity of its network, in response to growing customer demand.