NAIROBI: CCK Kenya has given the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA) eight weeks to conduct and submit results as to whether to lower or retain the current mobile terminal charges. In an interview with the Business Daily, Francis Wangusi, the acting director-general of the CCK commented that: “The study begun one week ago and by mid-June the operators should be able to know whether we'll lower them or not.” “Internally (within CCK), we don't see why the rates should not come down further even up to zero.” In a statement Safaricom commented: “We believe CCK's rigid implementation of an extremely low MTR that does not reflect market costs could cripple the industry.” On the other hand, Bharti Airtel, Essar and Orange Kenya are advocating for lower termination rates since they pay Safaricom a slice of their revenues as they handle cross network calls since they still are dominating the voice market. “Artificially low termination rates do not allow operators to fully recover the cost of receiving and terminating calls received from other networks and this significantly impacts the network receiving the largest number of cross-network calls such as Safaricom,” argued Safaricom.
