HAS AIRTEL BOUGHT yuMOBILE?

 Unconfirmed reports indicate that telco Airtel may have purchased the Kenya operations of Essar Communications run under the brand yuMobile.

Sources cannot seem to give a rationale for the alleged purchase but point that it could be acquisition of subscribers.

yu has been seeking ways to pay mast fees it owes Airtel and has talked of bringing in a strategic investor.

Will update as soon as we get details.

Telcos, Safaricom, Airtel woo unregistered customers as CEOs see red

There comes a time, when even as a CEO of a major corporation, you realize that in the scheme of things, you are just another citizen to the government.

That was the it moment for telecom operators earlier this week when government decided to crack down on their CEOs for failing to register SIM cards within their network.

After what seemed a harmless threat by the Cabinet Secretary for Information that Telcos CEOs would be held criminally liable for unregistered SIM cards on their networks, CID officers were dispatched to collect them from their premises.

As CEOs frantically paced back and forth trying to figure out what was going on, it became apparent that CID officers would pounce on them once they came out and march them to the nearest police station.

Telkom Orange CEO Mickael Ghossein was the first to record his statement on Monday and later went back on Tuesday.

With Twitter buzzing about his imminent arrest, Safaricom's CEO Bob Collymore also recorded his statement on Tuesday.

Shivan Bhargava of Airtel had to play hide and seek with the CID officers and eventually made it out of Parkside Towers through the Fire Escape and the basement.

Madhur Taneja appeared to be spared.

Airtel and yu are the worst offenders, a person with familiarity of the situation said.

Indeed, Airtel was said to have about 600,000 unregistered SIM cards as well as those that were registered with false ID numbers.

Safaricom because of its M-PESA network had relatively much fewer but still had SIM card numbers being activated without registration.

A press conference by the four CEOs on Tuesday had to be rescheduled for 12:30 PM to allow technicians time to purge the offending numbers so that the telcos would demonstrate that they were compliant.

This they largely managed to do as the situation was drastically different from the day before when they were first summoned. Many unregistered numbers had disappeared as technicians spent the whole night working the systems.

Their indignation at their treatment was however misdirected as they blamed CCK.

Few took time to reflect on the fact that at the time of the ICC cases, they were able to provide prosecutors with the call records of key government figures during that time including who they called, who called them and so on.

When asked to provide call records for the Westgate terrorists, they did not have them.

Observing the mood of the CID officers sent to the telcos offices, staff said the order had to have come from the very top.

Meanwhile, faced with the prospect of revenue losses from switching off unregistered SIMs, some of the telcos have now begun reaching out to the owners of those numbers asking them to update their details.

NIS asks Safaricom, Airtel for Westgate mobile intel

National Intelligence Service (NIS) agents have asked mobile network operators Safaricom and Airtel to provide details of incoming and outgoing calls from the Westgate Mall at the time of the attack on shoppers by armed militants said to be Shabab.

This is another development that illuminates the number of areas security agencies need to incorporate in their national security plans.

Safaricom technicians say the information is gleaned from the four masts nearest to the Mall and of the data provided to the NIS agents, a lot of it involved international calls incoming most likely from relatives of those who were caught up in the mall during the attacks.

They added that had the authorities alerted them, they could have told them the closest they can provide information to real time is with a delay of 30 minutes.

But it is also possible to isolate all Mobile Outgoing Calls from Westgate that terminated in say Eastleigh or any other location in Kenya.

That would certainly be the tactic that NIS would seek to apply to try and narrow down to the suspected Shabab terrorists in case they were using mobile phones to communicate.

If they have credible leads then from there what they would seek to do is to establish pattern and networks.

This means they will go back to Safaricom and Airtel and get the call logs for those numbers they suspect were used by the terrorists.

Anyone who called them, and how often, and anyone they called and how often would also be snared into the dragnet so as to establish other liaisons as well as to nab high-worth suspects that can provide high-grade actionable information.

So expect a wave of arrests in the next two months or so.

SAFARICOM FIBER AIMS TO FINISH ACCESSKENYA

 Safaricom is digging up the city of Nairobi and along major highways as it lays 12,000 KM of fiber optic cable, 6000KM in Nairobi alone.

Contrary to what many people may think, Telkom Orange, KDN and Jamii Telecom are not the targets, AccessKenya is.

AK, recently the target of acquisition by Dimension Data, has spent about half a billion shillings to put up close to 400Km of cable in Nairobi and Mombasa.

But the sheer scale of Safaricom's effort dwarfs this and makes the case that perhaps it is the right time for the Somen's to sell.

Safaricom is not just overwhelming Access with the size and reach of its network, it also plans to hunt it in packs - of dealers.

Safaricom will not sell the fiber directly to neighbourhoods or households, it will first and foremost be a carrier of carriers.

In other words, it will lease the capacity to others for onward selling to customers. By putting many players in this field, it saves itself the cost of putting up costly sales infrastructure and fosters fierce competition against the likes of AccessKenya who will have to contend with different players selling Safaricom broadband in different parts of Nairobi, Mombasa and everywhere else they may operate.

While Safaricom says it will work with Telkom Orange to provide complementarity, it seems pretty clear, funds allowing, it intends to roll out county infrastructure to serve each county.

It is another step in the astonishing growth and total dominance of Safaricom in telecommunications, and one which inevitably will eventually see the breakup of the company by the government considering it is unmatched in another fast growing category Mobile Finance, and is still controls 70 per cent of the voice market.

Access meanwhile, will need to re strategize and chart out its future. If Dimension could have made a play for KDN's infrastructure and combine it with AccessKenya's metro infrastructure, they may have had a chance.

KDN was however taken over by Liquid Telecom which has a pan-African fiber network operation and recently opened what it called East Africa's largest Data Center.

If not, its curtains.

UHURU VS SAFARICOM, AIRTEL: 10 TARGETED IN DATA COLLECTION

Phone records from the post-election period for 10 personalities mostly pro-Kibaki including current President Uhuru Kenyatta's (both Safaricom and Airtle lines), a former State House operative, a Naivasha politician, among others were procured from mobile operators Safaricom and Airtel by ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda late last month and early July.

Without getting into the merits of the case filed by Stephen Kay in court, suffice to say, these two mobile operators are being sued most likely for providing personal data, call log records, to third parties.

Sources inside Safaricom indicate there were at least 10 notable personalities whose call logs from around that period the ICC wanted and came with a letter to that effect. Lawyers oversaw the pulling of the records including numbers they called, numbers that called them and how frequently.

An ICC lawyer, a lawyer for defense and one other likely from the State/AG's office were on hand as the records were retrieved indicating the ICC is still gathering evidence.

The lawyers demanded to know about the process of getting those records as well as other details like locations when calls were being made based on nearest BTS/Masts and so on. The exercise begun at Safaricom before moving to Airtel. Some of the numbers they wanted investigated did not show up as registered to anyone in the records.

Acquitted personalities Francis Muthaura and Hussein Ali's records were not requested for. This latest effort by the ICC then, seems geared specifically aimed at building the Uhuru Kenyatta case and may have informed the move to court by the president's counsel Stephen Kay.

Incidents like these, or the Eric Snowden spygate case involving US government access of personal data from Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc will serve to remind many of the need to pass the Data Protection Bill which we have been talking about for years. Europe which does not take such issues lightly has asked the US Attorney-General to explain clearly if European citizens were affected by these surveillance efforts something that could be costly for US firms found to have passed on data on Europeans to the US government.

Chebitwey, Washington Akumu shortlisted for Telkom Kenya job

The current CEO of the Kenya Yearbook, Dennis Chebitwey and the former Safaricom Public Relations and Promotions manager Washington Akumu, are among those shortlisted for the corporate affairs head position at Telkom Kenya that was recently vacated by Angela Mumo.

They are joined on the shortlist by Nelly Githaka who used to be the sponsorships manager at Safaricom before leaving in 2010 and Tom Ogola who formerly worked under Angela Mumo before heading to Mabati Rolling Mills.

Mumo left the job for a similar position at Microsoft that had been advertised a couple of months ago.

Chebitwey is a veteran PR strategist who used to work at Gina Din Communications before leaving for the Kenya Yearbook position.

Akumu on the other hand came from the newsroom serving as the Business Editor at the Daily Nation before he took up the post at Safaricom.

Ogola has also been in PR. He worked at the Africa Practice agency handling such clients as GTV, Telkom Kenya and so on before he took a position as a Media & External Stakeholders Relations manager at Telkom.

He then moved to Mabati Rolling Mills and then on to a law firm before starting his own consultancy.

Nelly Githaka has worked for Safaricom and is currently the general manager of Emergency Plus Medical Services.

All these candidates are excellent choices for a post said to command upwards of Sh800,000 a month.

Chebitwey is an excellent PR guy not just in practice but in person. He can work his way through the labyrinth of government offices and parliament and has a keen understanding of lobbying legislators.

Akumu of course brings experience from Safaricom a much bigger entity than Telkom and also understands the news business.

Ogola has the advantage of having worked at Telkom before and having handled many of the duties that will be required of the position.

Githaka would seem to the dark horse in this race but undoubtedly she has her qualities if she was shortlisted along with such a calibre of individuals.

It will be hard to call this one but we see it coming down to Chebitwey because of his experience and inside knowledge of the workings of the government machinery (the government is a key stakeholder for Telkom) and Ogola because of his insider credentials.

Akumu and Githaka are excellent choices too who could be disadvantaged by their "outsider" status.

But at the end of the day it will come down to what exactly Telkom is looking for in the person it wants to hire.

KENYA-ETHIOPIA 400MW POWER PROJECT TAKES OFF

A 686Km high-voltage line to bring 400MW of power purchased from Ethiopia into the Kenyan national grid is set to take off with the signing today of the funding deal with the International Development Agency (IDA), the concessionary-lending arm of the World Bank Group.

The Sh54billion transmission line is part a regional strategy to pool power that will gradually include Uganda and then Tanzania.

The power will come from the controversial Gibe III dam in Ethiopia whose construction has not been without hitches as pressure-groups raised the spectre of adverse downstream effects of damming a river that feeds into Lake Turkana.

Ethiopia is estimated to have 45,000MW of power and first sought guarantee from Kenya that it would take up the power if the nation undertook to put up the HEP dam.

The African Development Bank has already given Sh30billion toward the project while the French Development Bank (ADB) through its infrastructure-arm Proparco and the Government of Kenya will also partially fund the project whose total cost is put at Sh94billion.

Two High-Voltage Direct Current converters will be put up at Suswa in Kenya and Wolayita Sodo in Ethiopia.

The project will be implemented by the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company (Ketraco) and the Ehtiopia Electric Power Corporation (EEPCO).

Kenya will buy the power at 5 US cents per Kilowatt Hour which is much lower than most power producers sell their power to monopoly distributor Kenya Power. Lake Turkana Wind Project for example, proposes to sell power to Kenya Power at 7 US cent/Kwh.

The power will transmit at 600Kilovolts much higher than the beefed up 400Kv line being built from Mombasa to Nairobi to bring power from the likes of Rabai Power station, Kipevu III and the proposed 600MW coal-fired plant in Kilifi.

Indeed, Ketraco is embarking on a stabilization project of the national grid so that it can handle these high voltages.

The power will come in direct current form which is much cheaper to transmit over long distances and sees lower dissipation rates (wastage).

Two high-voltage DC converters will be built at Suswa and Sodo. The Sodo one will convert generating alternating current into direct current for transmission and at Suswa the DC will be converted to AC and injected into the national grid.

The route from Ethiopia, according to project documents will be:from Ethiopia into Kenya approximately 90 km West of Moyale town and traverses Marsabit, Samburu, Isiolo, Laikipia, Nyandarua and Nakuru. From Moyale the transmission line route runs adjacent to the Great North Highway (Marsabit – Moyale) in a southerly direction avoiding Marsabit National Park. From Marsabit area the route runs southwards at a maximum distance of 500 m parallel to the main Isiolo – Marsabit Highway to Laisamis.

At Laisamis Town the proposed RoW runs close to the road as it enters Losai game reserve keeping a range of about 400 m to 800 m off the road reserve then runs further on to Merille where it diverts slightly westwards running east of Matthews Range, 6 km east of the Lololokwe Mountain peak. It then runs through a stretch of fairly flat land covered by thorny shrubs and bushes, and then turns southwards to the Ngoborbit plateaus and ridges dropping altitude down into Laikipia.

In Laikipia, the proposed RoW continues through the extreme western section of Mpala Ranch which is covered by scattered thickets and bushes. Then it crosses Mutara River into Ndaragwa. The line runs on top ridge of Shamata and then sharply drops altitude to the flat plains of Olobolossat, 3.7 kilometres eastwards of Lake Ol Bolossat. It then traverses the Olkalou Settlement Scheme and cuts across Malewa River, climbing a steep hill then drops altitude to the flat land of Marangishu (karati) and on-wards to Kijabe after crossing the Nakuru – Nairobi highways into plains east of Mt. Longonot into the proposed Suswa Substation.