You may have noticed some calm on your Facebook timeline in the last few days. On normal days, we’re usually flooded by posts about cheap Safaricom Bundles on sale.
The honeymoon is over for the ‘Bundles Mwitu’ sellers as Bob Collymore has decided to crack the whip.
On Friday last week, Safaricom gave the bundles resellers a knockout punch by introducing a cap on the amount of data you can sambaza. You can now only transfer a total of 20mbs per day, in two 10 mbs transactions.
Some of the ‘bundes mwitu’ sellers were left with huge stocks and there were some reports that they’ve opted to sell their sim cards.
There’s now an online petition on ‘Change.org’ that seeks to compel Safaricom to remove the cap, as well as look into the data expiry issue.
It has over 100 signatures, and you can sign it HERE.
Here’s the full text.
It comes as a shock to many users that Safaricom has put a 20 MB cap to data bundle transfers, know as ‘Sambaza Bundle’. The limits seems to have been implemented following the launch of newer, ‘cheaper’ data bundle tariffs introduced sometimes towards the end of February 2015.
There was not clear explanation given as to why the change now, but the new limits affect normal users who normally transfer data bundles between different SIM cards in their devices.
I urge Safaricom to rethink this decision and quickly reverse it. We are also appealing to the Communications Authority of Kenya to study the data bundle pricing and aggressively put regulatory measures on this business so as to protect customers against noncompetitive business practices from the dominant market player.
Of great concern to most data users is the ‘expiry’ of purchase data bundles after a specified period, a usually unreasonably short period determined solely by the operator. This practice need to be regulated so as to protect consumers from loss of purchase service.
While I think Safaricom will look into the expiry issue, I believe the data Sambaza is closed business… well, unless the petition gets insane numbers.
