Equity Bank's Equitel has acquired 1.9 per cent share of the total mobile subscriptions in Kenya, eating into Airtels’ customer base. This is according to the latest statistics from the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA).

Equitel registered 665,661 mobile subscribers during the January-March 2015 period and recorded an on-net traffic (within the same network) of 2.3 million minutes while the traffic to other mobile networks stood at 17.2 million.

Airtel was the only Telecom firm that saw its customer base shrink by 7.8 per cent while Safaricom had a slight gain of 2.3 per cent in new customer base. Airtel lost more than 595,000 customers from its networks.

Telkom Orange had the biggest gain in customer base, registering a 12 per cent increase to see its customers rise by more than 400,000.

The entry into the market by Equitel shows that there is still potential for growth and further competition in the mobile sub sector. The statistics also showed that mobile subscriptions recorded a growth of 3.6 per cent to reach 34.8 million subscribers from 33.6 million recorded in the previous quarter, representing a mobile penetration of 85.5 per cent.

According to the report, the number of mobile money transfer subscribers increased by three per cent to reach 26.7 million up from 26 million recorded during the last quarter while the number of agents rose to 126,622 up from 121,924.

“Internet subscriptions in the country grew to 18.8 million up from 16.3 million subscriptions recorded during the last quarter, a growth of 14.3 per cent. Internet users, as a result, rose to 29.1 million up from 26.1 million the previous quarter. This raised the population with access to internet to 71.7 per cent up from 64.1 per cent during the last quarter,” the report said.

READ: Equity-Airtel deal steals Safaricom’s thunder with money-transfer platform

There was however a slight drop in the fixed network traffic, registering a decline of 11.2 per cent to register 22.3 million minutes down from 25.1 million minutes realised during the last quarter.

In terms of mobile money, Airtel was again the loser seeing a 3.5 per cent drop in subscriptions and a 7.5 per cent drop in its agents base, with Equitel being the biggest gainer with 68.7 per cent growth in subscription from October 2014.

Roaming calls within the East African region contributed 17.5 million minutes of the roaming-out voice traffic of 20.8 million minutes indicating the benefits of the one network service implemented last year.