Mobile service sub-sector in Kenya continues to grow and employ more Kenyans in the recent years. Data from the Communication Authority of Kenya (CA) shows that 2550 people were absorbed into the industry between June 2016 to June 2020.
By June 2020, the number of kenyans employed in the mobile sub-sector stood at 8,728 while in the 2019 the numbers were at 8,689 during the similar period.
The five-year trend of employment in the sub sector also reveals that more male employees are joining the mobile industry compared to female counterparts by a difference of 1,260.
CA data also shows that Safaricom’s fixed data customers went up by 25% between the months of March and June 2020 to stand at 207,398,giving the mobile provider a 33.5% lead in the market.
Zuku service which is owned by Wananchi Online saw a 15% increase in subscribers between March and June this year to stand at 201,605, representing a 32.5% share of the market.
The new statistics are attributed to high demand for internet connectivity after the COVID19 break out which forced many Kenyans to work or study online.
The period also saw more than 90% of the total 619,579 subscribers opting for fibre speeds of more than 2mbps connected to their homes and businesses while 18% opted for connections higher than 20mbps.
The further reveals that the general consumption of 132,397,651GB of mobile data between March and June 2020. This is 19% higher than what was consumed in the similar period last year.
But CA's data paints a completely different picture from the increased cases of cybercrime cited by various organisations for the time the economy was under lockdown.
“During the fourth quarter, the National Computer Incident Response Team/Coordination Center, KE-CIRT/CC detected 13.9 million cyber threat attempts, which was a 59.9% decrease from the 34.6-million cyber threat attempts detected in the previous quarter,” CA said in the report.
The authority attributed 'their decline' to timely incident response mechanisms and increased endpoint security measures they had put in place to protect end user devices.