Thanks Sidney for initiating this debate.
Listers,
Not sure if you've seen the stir online of changes to the ToS with Safaricom's home offering.
The response from the company has been disappointing in the extreme, misleading with statistics and suggesting that it's best customers are
thieves,
never mind that working for home has lead to increased demand and use of their services.
That tweet certainly does not call resellers thieves. It calls them resellers.
All this is beside the point, at least for this forum, what I'm concerned about this that if we didn't have an eagle-eyed blogger looking out for this, it would have been completely missed until it was already in place.
So I have a few of questions:
- Does the CA have any policies around ToS changes around services under their purview and how they are communicated to users?
Perhaps CA should update that information. It is 6 years old. But good information nevertheless.
- Should companies that run what could be considered critical infrastructure be allowed to arbitrarily change their ToS to apply retroactively especially if it's to the detriment of their customers?
I hope lawyers here can help us with this.
- If customers choose not to accept a change in ToS what redress do they have given that perhaps the provider is the only one available in their area.
- Finally, given that we know this could all be avoided if there was more competition in the fibre market, what is the CA doing to make it so that we have more competition in that area? It's concerning that Safaricom seems to only option for home connections
in several places
Safaricom PLC 229,406 subscribers, 35.6% market share
Wananchi Group (Kenya) Ltd* 202,237 subscribers , 31.4 35.6% market share
Jamii Telecommunications Ltd 127,914 subscribers , 19.8 Poa % market share
Internet Kenya Ltd 56,824 subscribers ,8.8% market share
Mawingu Networks Ltd 11,087 subscribers, 1.7 % market share
Internet Solutions Kenya Ltd 9,228 subscribers, 1.4 % market share
Consumers are speaking with their wallets.
As a policy discussion list, probably what we should be asking is what is the fair cost for certain broadband packages, and whether there is anything that can be really unlimited. Wearing my competent network engineer hat, I can tell you even at Safaricom,
they don't have unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is a limited resource to the extent of the network devices, network media, and cost of acquiring and delivering that bandwidth to your edge device.