The Communications Authority of Kenya has said that telecom firms will be “compelled” to offer free credit to subscribers as compensation for outages on their systems.

The companies, including Safaricom, Airtel and Telkom Kenya, will be required to give rebates to subscribers that will be equivalent to the amount of airtime used during the outage period, Daily Nation newspaper reported.

However, rebates will not be offered on network outages that were due to scheduled maintenance or bad weather.

The report said that the regulator aims to push mobile operators to offer reliable services to customers, adding that such outages also impact mobile money transfer and data services.

 The outage, which began on August 5, stretched into the weekend, disrupting government services and payment systems.

The telecom regulator said that protests over these services accounted for half of the customer complaints registered between April 1 and June 30, 2022.

 (Editing by Cleofe Maceda; cleofe.maceda@lseg.com)