This new proposition is great!...The only thing Airtel needs to do is invest in good mobile money network and they are good to go!....I think the only thing that holds people to Safaricom is mpesa- it is a lock-in strategy and if Airtel can work on this, then Safaricom will be kept on their toes...

Let us resist any attempt to seem to tolerate/encourage monopolies however good.

I use kencell-celtel-zain-airtel and though this is a good deal, it has killed their off-net sms business. Why should I now send an sms at ksh 2 if I can speak to that person for a full minute

You are right.

Am on the 1000 Safaricom bundle and I've accumulated 4000 On-net minutes over a one year period and yet am a heavy user.... Downside is that I always exhaust my Off-net allocation before month end...

Get the Samsung Mega 5.8 duo sim and add on the new airtel tariff and load it with 500 airtime via airtel money for 250 minutes offnet talktime.

I used to be an Airtel fanboy until they grew familiar with me.
First it started with a certain promo they had going on that would alert you after your regular calls that if you follow up with a call that lasts X min you will receive 500% of your credit's worth of talk time.
So I did. Did they honour their promise?.. No not at all. So I vowed never to fall for that deceptive marketing ever again. Then a plague of promotion SMSes started flooding my phone like every 3-4hrs until I had to set my app to weed these promotional messages away.

It was hair yanking down right annoying! Like that isn't enough they put a national anthem tone to anyone who calls me without my consent until one of my buddies commented on how I have chapad! Until I called myself and confirmed it, little did I know I had been automatically subscribed to a service I wasn't even aware was deducting my credit at an alarming rate.

I complained, they sorted out the issue but never refunded anything so I overlooked the matter, they repeated that again and again I forwarded the incidents to chukuahatua a branch of CCK that stands for the consumer's rights and nothing seemed to be done about it. I even have reports to chukuahatua about their disservice and misconduct but the situation never got any better. I decided I had had it.

I vukad to safcom and funny enough safcom welcomed me with all that I had lost from Airtel literally! It was totally unbelievable!!!!
Its funny but from the tariff charge one thinks its cheaper to use Airtel over Saf but the call quality on Airtel just washes down any savings and find that you are left with talk time on Saf. Saf has a myriad of options. I love options!