28/08/2024
Mr. Speaker Sir, tumehama, hatuogopi!
Freedom has come: Safaricom should exit for SpaceX
The recent memo by Safaricom to (Communication Authority) CA recommending blocking of the unlicensed entry of Space X to the Kenyan cyberspace appears as mere business competition that should be handled by the Competition Authority of Kenya. However, when Safaricom chose to go the regulator, it itself speaks of the battle royale for their business survival by attempting to stop the clock of technology. Elon Musk’s Space X is experiencing customer growth in explosive proportions in Kenya. They are providing 100 to 200mbps speed of internet at a paltry Kes. 6,500 with the end game of ensuring internet access is free in future. It does not require money to have the earth move around the sun nor the moon to rotate around the earth to host space stations. On the contrary Safaricom like other Kenya ISP charge more than Kes 100,000 monthly premium and anything beyond Kes. 500,000 installation costs for the same package
So, what does Safaricom want?
1. They want CA to force a Starlink partnership with local ISPs to literally resale the SpaceX bundles at very high rates and block them from accessing the consumers directly. They want to be middlemen or brokers.
2. They indicate that the GoK will not be able to control the operations of SpaceX if granted direct access. This is a painful admission to concerns of the Kenya citizenry at how deep the government controls Safaricom during elections, KRA Tax witch hunts and tracking and forced disappearance of activists in the name of the criminal justice system.
3. To suggest quote the data protection act is an abuse of Kenyan highly digital populace. Most of the multinational companies have far superior General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) of which the Kenyan Data Protection Act is a mere subset with little or no influence.
4. We have had giants like Microsoft (Azure), Google Workspace, Amazon Web Services (AWS) collude with local ISP with the sole intention of keeping high rates to consumers. There’s no specific value addition, no high-grade technical competencies to develop similar services and the only colocation known is hosting and hoarding representatives of these giant tech companies in their offices.
Why the fear?
1. Local ISPs will lose all revenues that come with internet service provision and related services.
2. With the near free internet pe*******on in every corner of the country, secure VoIP calls will be the voice calls of choice by the young people to the loss of the normal expensive GSM calls.
3. A possibility of a singular global network platform, will be a great equalizer only second to death. Education, job opportunities, a global market place will finally deliver freedom to Africans!
4. Any disruptive technology is normally resisted but when it comes, it breaks those who do not embrace it. When MPesa, came, it almost ran down all the banks and they had to embrace the disruptive technology.
Let us not delude ourselves that blocking SpaceX is preserving our sovereignty. In this country, there’s no data to protect. In fact, it is safe to have our data on international space for us to be protected from our government.
