According to the daily nation pg26 Telkom-k is uncomfortable with the interconnection charges(on their fixed line) which they previously agreed to before they were announced citing high operational cost dueto vandalism.

They are trying to get audience with the ministry.

Mambo bado.This zain offer Is going to hurt rather than favour the telecommuiction industry.

I would be the last person to have mercy on telkom,they had their time during the booth milolongo's and mis-used it,mistreated the masses its their time to cry in the toilet and pay back.

What about tax collection? Is there going to be any impact to the taxes collected?

see what happens with monopoly? Pay back!

This is not a safcom thread dont come to annoy me here pls

We've come from far, i remember when you had to pay a bribe of kitu 20K to get a card for your number and wait another few months to get a line, bribe to have it repaired, bribe to pay your bills. But today i left my orange wireless at home, its now cheaper to call from my safcom/zain line, only thing is you cannot divert their calls.

The frogs (french) must have done their SWOT analysis of Telekom on the back of fag pack and then used the same to pay out Ksh26bn.
They now realise they've bought a business which thinks competition is a dirty word.

New rates...2bob per minute within orange, sms @1bob within orange. Calls to other networks @4bob per minute, sms to other networks @2bob, effective midnight today

Telkom/Orange!

I have no love for these guys. If you snoop around in the privately owned companies frontier, you may have heard of KenCall, Kenya's first and largest call center.

When KenCall came, they invested heavily in things that were supposed to be provided by the Government, including an independent Satellite communication system because there was no reliable voice connectivity to their target market (the US and UK). And by the way, there still isnt.

Understandably, due to their heavy investments, KenCall had to leverage this by charging slightly more than what you would find in India, etc. Their pricing was something like 6% more than India. Insignificant, but still high.

One of the worst mistakes KenCall did, in my opinion, was to take on Orange/Telkom as a client. By the time this was happening, KenCall had lucrative and stable clients from the US and UK paying good (not excellent) but good rates.

To take on Orange, which promised heaven on earth for KenCall, and was indeed willing to pay KenCall's asking price for call center services, KenCall had to lay off some of its existing clients in order to accomodate the space requirement for them. By this time, I think KenCall was not ready to expand just yet, and so cost/benefit analysis prevailed.

Soon as this was done, three months into the deal, KenCall started feeling the heat. Bills were not being paid. Three/four months would go and no payments made. and every month, bills would grow, because increase in volume as Orange continued to push for more customers. A year or so down the lane, and KenCall couldnt take it any more. They even re-negotiated the pricing to make it easier for Orange to afford, if they were having cash flow issues.

Soon, the cash flow problem at Orange would be transferred to KenCall. It was until the CEO of KenCall depleted his own account paying for employees that the late salary payments, the negative blogging about outsourcing in Kenya and massive retrenchments started. They almost brought a budding company, and indeed, a whole industry to its knees.

regretably, the insensitive businessmen they are, decided to renegotiate deals with other proxy call centers that were emerging. KenCall's outfit was based on the highest level of quality. The frenchies decided this was not their priority and so, sought a cheaper low quality supplier of call center services. Interestingly, there is no such thing as lower quality in customer service, and as they are realizing now, they frontier in data (modem sales, wimax, etc is now dead. and they are so shortsighted to realize that they plucked the only reason customers were buying their services and staying with them out of the equation.

KenCall is, as I am made to understand, now recovering from this episode that lasted almost two years. They still have Orange (got to love the tolerance levels of the CEO) but on a much smaller scale than they started. Telkom has moved its businesses to some call center where its staff are learning on the job. Meanwhile, KenCall is back in the initial target market frontier it started with. All the best.

These guys destroyed peoples lives in the most significant way. and they could care less. According to a study I refer to, KenCall lost close to 900 employees directly due to bad business with a dont give a shit client. and sadly, customer care at Orange Telkom is headed by several Kenyans. They failed to advise senior management and infact, pro-actively pushed for the decisions because they got some cuts in the deals with the other call centers. Its payback time! Rot all the way. now we dont really care. Just like you never did.

@Ken1979,
True, i have come across this report, and you gotta give Eric Nesbitt credit, he has gotten more flak than favour but single handedly against all odds prevailed in impossible circumstances and brought this industry to where it is and rightly so has gotten a head of state recommendation. In my opinion after they acquired Earthlink and Dan & Bradstreet,the only way was up but Orange/Telcom really messed them up.But Eric is one to watch, this guy is really something else.