NAIROBI: Bharti Airtel Kenya has now accused Safaricom of wanting to make more profits from the current mobile termination rates. Shivan Bhargava, MD of Airtel Kenya explained that Safaricom intends to use a higher termination rate as a revenue stream rather than a cost recovery tool. Safaricom argued that: “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.” “The high interconnection rates have only benefited one operator which is Safaricom and who does not want to let it go because it is a revenue stream to them.” This has brewed misunderstandings as Safaricom recently accused Airtel of failing to pay up their estimated debt of close to half a billion shillings. Airtel stated that the current interconnection charges would lead to a delay in its return to profitability and that a large share of calls made by its subscribers go to Safaricom where as very few calls originate from within the network. “The current market shareholding means that large share of calls made by our subscribers go to the leading mobile operator, while very few calls originate from the network to ours.”
