Nairobi, April 15, 2020: The global picture regarding the COVID-19 pandemic is evolving quickly. At Telkom, as I had mentioned to you late last month, we have the health, safety and wellbeing of our employees, customers, business partners and other stakeholders, at the centre of everything that we do. It also remains our pledge to continue serving all our stakeholders in a timely manner.

Most importantly, to our customer, we appreciate the role our network plays in keeping you connected, at a time such as this. We keep on assessing the viability of alternative avenues to better enable you to go about your daily life, cognisant of the need for you to stay at home as much as possible, during this time.

In the past two weeks, we have experienced a sharp increase in data usage on our network. This is as a result of the increased number of users: business owners, employees, teachers, students, and other professionals, who must now minimise their movement but still meet their contractual, professional, business or educational obligations.

Furthermore, we have noted changes in our network traffic patterns; there is now higher data usage in areas where our network had not been dimensioned to support such unusually high traffic. This means that more of our subscribers are now consuming data in these areas, majorly residential locations, as they are now actively working and studying from their homes. To this end, and in light of the increased usage of data during this time, Telkom is already expediting a network optimisation and rebalancing exercise across the country, starting off with areas that we have identified needing immediate intervention.

We are appreciative of the feedback that we have received so far, insights that shall be infused into all scheduled changes and upgrades to our network. We expect that the measures that we are currently undertaking, will ensure better and more reliable 3G and 4G connectivity from us, to you.

Telkom also recently announced, that its partnership with Loon, the Alphabet Company working to bring balloon-powered Internet to Kenya, has received all regulatory and Cabinet approvals to begin flying balloons in Kenya. Once the balloons are in place over the coming few weeks, this new technology will complement our ongoing strategy to further widen our network coverage, confirming us as your preferred data network.

We urge you to stay home and to stay safe, as we do our bit to keep you connected.

Mugo Kibati.

CEO

Ends…/