Safaricom Home Internet - Fair Usage Policy

This is my fifth year of using the Safaricom Home (fiber to the home (FTTH)) internet service. I signed up in Oct 2016 for the silver package for KES 3,499 per month (increased to KES 3,999 in Oct 2018). 

It has been a wonderful experience - very reliable (no downtime exceeding 1-2 hours) and speeds consistent with the advertised 10 Mbps (upload and download) shared with 3 other users. A fault router, causing very slow internet speeds, was efficiently replaced at no cost in August 2019.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, Safaricom doubled the upload and download speed to 20 Mbps at no additional cost. This helped my household get through the season where we were working and learning from home, on Zoom, Google Classroom and other online programs. Lots of data was spent too on Netflix, YouTube, ShowMax, Apple Music, DSTV Now etc.

 
Last week Safaricom announced they will be making the data increases permanent with effect from 1 March 2021. This is welcome news! However they will also introduce a ‘fair usage’ data cap of 500GB for the bronze package and 1,000GB for the other packages. When the user gets to the limit, the speed will be throttled to 1 Mbps and 3 Mbps respectively.

 
I am assuming that lots of people at Safaricom know about loss aversion bias (“... that the pain of losing is psychologically about twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.”) and that the focus of these changes will be the loss of the unlimited data for the Safaricom Home internet. If so it is puzzling that they are not making more effort to communicate these changes clearly and directly to the subscribers.

I doubt that any Safaricom Home internet users know how much bandwidth they utilize in a month. To the best of my knowledge Safaricom does not send data utilization reports so the users have to rely on the Safaricom Home app which I found to be difficult to set up or use.

So what are the chances of exceeding the 1,000 GB (1TB) cap in one month? Well it depends on internet usage - gaming and streaming videos use significantly more bandwidth than listening to music or radio, browsing web pages (Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram etc.) or chatting on WhatsApp. It also depends on the number of people living in the household.

Assuming that streaming video is the application that will use the most bandwidth. I did a high level research as to how much bandwidth is used in streaming video. The results are listed below.

• “Watching TV shows or movies on Netflix uses about 1 GB of data per hour for each stream of standard definition video, and up to 3 GB per hour for each stream of HD video.’ - Netflix
• “YouTube uses approximately 562.5MB of data per hour when streaming at 480p resolution (standard definition), according to research by MakeUseOf.com” 
• Streaming video can use up to 3GB of data per hour depending on the quality and streaming service. - Showmax
• As with any other video services, content streamed from DStv Now could potentially use large amounts of data. You can expect to consume up to 1.15MB of data per minute at the lowest SD resolution and up to 41MB of data per minute at the highest HD resolution while streaming Catch Up and Live TV. - DSTV
• 60 minutes of streaming using Apple Music will use about 40MB.

Subdividing the monthly cap of 1,000GB into a daily amount works out to approximately 30GB. My household comprises 5 people so that works out to a daily cap of 6GB per person.

 
If this is accurate then 5 people streaming HD video for more than 2 hours each day or SD video for more than 6 hours a day will use up the monthly cap of 1,000GB. The key therefore is to reduce the quality of the video stream to standard definition.

Usage spikes during weekends so the low usage during the weekdays should ensure that most months we remain below the cap. The March/April holidays though will be a nightmare as I cannot see how we will not hit the cap of 1,000GB.

I will need to ensure that regular TV (over the air or cable) works well enough to meet the demand for all the content that can be watched using this medium and not use the internet to watch TV.

I anticipate many unpleasant conversations when users who are throttled dispute the finding that they have used up the cap of 1,000GB. I hope that Safaricom will send out a warning when the user gets to 750GB or thereabouts.  

[Update - 26 Feb 2021]

Safaricom do provide the average monthly data usage for the Home internet service using USSD *400# It is the first option on the list (0). My average monthly usage is 425 GB.