Consumer complaints against broadcasters topped the number if grievances filled with the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) in the three months to December 2024, new disclosure showed, jumping almost six-fold to overtake traditionally dominant petitions sent to the regulator. In its just-published quarterly review report, CA said it received a total of 310 complaints during the period, out of which 136 were against broadcaster services representing 43.9 percent of all the complaints filed with it. The rise marked a 591 percent jump from the 23 complaints lodged against broadcasters during the preceding quarter ended in September 2024. The grievances which include issues raised against television or radio content encompasses airing of offensive materials, privacy violations, false, misleading, or indecent ads, program timings as well as service interruptions or termination. These were complaints escalated to the Authority for delay or failure of resolution by the responsive service providers,” CA notes in the report.

During the quarter under review, fraud complaints as well as those related to confidentiality and privacy breaches took the second and third positions at 25 and 24 petitions respectively, ahead of unfair trading practices and data and voice quality concerns which totaled 22 and 18 respectively. Others included billing (12), delays, failure or termination of service provisioning (10), cybercrime (9), service interruptions (9), frequency interference (7), unsolicited SMS (6), e-commerce (5), unauthorized subscriptions (4) as well as postal/courier (4).

Out of the overall complaints forwarded to the regulator during the period, 280 had been resolved at the time of publishing the report. Some 30 cases were still pending, with concerns over poor data and voice quality services having slowed restoration rate as only half had obtained closure. The CA is mandated to protect consumers from poor services by operators and it monitors quality delivered by telecom firms to ensure their standards meet set parameters. During the year ended 2023, for instance, the regulator Quality of Service report showed that only Safaricom surpassed 80 percent threshold after it posted a 90 percent score on the key performance indicators. According to the report, Airtel and Telkom Kenya attained 79 percent and 65 percent respectively, translating to an industry average of 72.4 percent, a significant drop when put against the average of 82.3 percent attained in the year to June 2022 and 75.5 percent the previous year. “The Communications Authority of Kenya has issued warning notices to Airtel and Telkom Kenya for non-Compliance with quality of service provided to consumers on their mobile telephony networks,” said CA in a statement following the report’s publishing.