Movie and videogame pirates to blame for the end of Safaricom unlimited data

According to Bob Collymore, a small number of internet users were taking up a large majority of the bandwidth available on the Safaricom network, which made offering unlimited internet an unsustainable business. How is it possible that it all came to this?

Well, studies have shown that the most bandwidth intensive activities on the internet are torrenting and streaming of large files, mostly movies and video games. Many Kenyans, especially those who pirate movies via torrent websites, are guilty of such practises. Was it beyond Safaricom to check out who is guilty of torrenting and prevent them from using the network? Many major ISPs, Access Kenya included, have systems in place to monitor the use of torrent and magnet files, and effectively lock down the perpetrators of these offenses. Safaricom’s actions seemed like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We spoke to a Safaricom Value Added Services manager Raymond Juma to clarify this issue.

He said, “Torrenters were abusing the system and ruining the experience for the other users. We decided instead of letting paying users to get a negative experience, to pull the plug on it altogether.”
On whether they should have identified the abusers, he said, “We tried throttling the offensive users one by one according to fair use principles, but what happens when you do that is that all the subscribers to the bundle get a negative experience. This is a global issue with mobile traffic. It didn’t make business sense. Other bundles were being used alot, so we decided to offer those to our customers.”