When Safaricom first listed the Baicells 5G router on their website, I zeroed in on one particular spec: the battery backup. They promised 3 hours. Now, if you’ve used the Airtel 5G router like I have, you’ll know why that number caught my attention. Airtel’s unit, with its external battery, easily gives me 6 hours before it taps out. That’s almost an entire afternoon’s worth of doomscrolling when the lights go off.

So, when I walked into Quickmart and finally got my hands on the Baicells router, I was itching to see if Safaricom was overselling or underselling. And here’s the shocker — they undersold. In my tests (yes, multiple tests because I didn’t believe it the first time), the router consistently lasted about 4 hours. That’s a full hour more than what Safaricom claims, though still 2 hours shy of Airtel’s beefy external battery solution.

Of course, battery health is like that friend who promises to show up to every plan — great in the beginning, less reliable with time. I don’t know how the Baicells unit will perform six months or a year down the road, but right now, fresh out of the box, it’s giving me 4 solid hours without flinching.

Now, before you get too excited, let’s be real. Four hours isn’t a whole day’s work-from-home session, but it’s good enough to hold you through a power cut, a long meeting, or an extra episode when Kenya Power thinks you’ve had enough electricity for the day.

The bigger story, though, is that Safaricom now has a 5G router option that actually matches Airtel’s on the battery backup front — not in total longevity, but in the fact that it has one. Their other models (like the Huawei router that just came back in stock on Masoko) don’t have built-in batteries at all, which makes the Baicells unit stand out.

Pair that with Safaricom’s quirks like the user limits and Fair Usage Policy checks, and you start to see the full picture of living with these routers. It’s not just about the raw speed. It’s about how practical they are when you’re juggling Kenya Power’s mood swings and Safaricom’s fine print.

So here’s my verdict: the Baicells 5G router may not beat Airtel’s 6-hour champ, but it does better than Safaricom is willing to admit. And if you’re the kind of person who values that extra hour of Wi-Fi during an outage, this router just might be worth the pick.