The Communications Authority of Kenya’s latest Quality of Service report for FY 2024-2025 gives us the usual headline verdict on the country’s mobile operators: Safaricom came out on top, Airtel followed, and Telkom trailed badly.
On paper, that sounds useful enough for consumers trying to decide which network deserves their money. But once you read the fine print, one omission stands out immediately, and it is a serious one. The report lists latency, jitter, and packet loss among the quality indicators that matter, then quietly notes that jitter and packet-loss-related KPIs were not assessed because video and gaming tests were not included in the measurements. That is not a small gap. It is the kind of omission that makes the report feel stuck in an older mobile era.
The CA says its current QoS framework was established in 2017 and still relies on three pillars: end-to-end drive tests, network performance data, and user experience surveys. That made sense at a time when the public conversation around network quality leaned heavily on whether voice calls went through, SMS delivered on time, and webpages opened without too much drama.
But in 2026, people are not just buying mobile bundles to make calls and load static pages. They are streaming video, watching live football on their phones, sitting through video calls, uploading clips to TikTok, joining live sessions, and increasingly playing real-time games where stability matters just as much as raw speed. A network can look acceptable on broad access metrics and still be miserable for exactly the kinds of experiences modern users care about most.
That is why the omission of gaming and video testing matters. Jitter and packet loss are not obscure engineering trivia for telecom nerds who enjoy arguing in acronyms. They are part of what determines whether a livestream keeps stuttering, whether a video call turns into a pixelated mess, whether voice chat stays in sync, and whether online gameplay feels responsive or broken. If you leave those out, you are not just trimming the edges of the story. You are skipping a whole category of real-world usage where networks get exposed fast.
“Yes, the report can tell you which operator is more likely to complete a voice call, maintain broad coverage, or deliver general internet accessibility. What it cannot tell you with confidence is which network will better handle a mobile gaming session, a livestream, or a long video call.”
And this is not some niche corner of the market anymore. Even here in Kenya, the signals are obvious. Just last week, Mdundo said it expanded its music gaming product to Kenya as part of a wider regional rollout, while also pushing a more app-centric, mobile-first experience. Back in September, Safaricom hosted its first gaming conference in Nairobi, framing gaming as a serious part of Africa’s digital economy rather than a side hobby for teenagers with too much screen time. Those are not isolated curiosities. They point to a market where interactive entertainment, digital media consumption, and mobile-first engagement are becoming more central, not less.
That is exactly why the CA’s report feels oddly incomplete. The authority is essentially telling the public that it measured mobile quality across all 47 counties, published national and regional scores, and ranked operators on overall service performance, but did not fully test the network conditions that affect some of the most sensitive and fastest-growing categories of usage. So yes, the report can tell you which operator is more likely to complete a voice call, maintain broad coverage, or deliver general internet accessibility. What it cannot tell you with confidence is which network will better handle a mobile gaming session, a livestream, a long video call, or even the kind of heavy, interactive media use that increasingly defines smartphone life.
That leaves end users with an incomplete picture. If you are an esports player, a casual PUBG Mobile user, a creator uploading videos, a remote worker on Zoom or Google Meet, or just someone who hates buffering with a personal grudge, this report does not really answer the questions you would care about most. It measures the network like Kenya is still mostly a voice-and-SMS country with some extra data sprinkled on top. That is not how people use mobile networks anymore, and regulators should stop pretending otherwise.
The frustrating part is that the report itself already acknowledges these metrics exist and matter. The target table includes latency, jitter, and packet loss, but then carves out the most relevant scenarios where jitter and packet loss would actually be tested. That makes the omission harder to excuse. It is not that the CA does not know these indicators matter. It is that the authority chose to publish a national quality report without fully operationalizing them. For consumers, that weakens the usefulness of the final rankings. For operators, it also reduces pressure to optimize the parts of network performance that matter most for modern digital experiences.
There is also a bigger policy problem here. If the regulator does not measure gaming and video quality in a serious way, then those use cases are easier to treat as optional extras instead of mainstream consumer needs. That would be a mistake. Kenya’s telecom industry likes to talk endlessly about digital transformation, creators, youth culture, innovation, and the future of the internet. Fine. Then the country’s QoS measurements should reflect the services people actually use in that future, not just the ones regulators were comfortable measuring years ago.
At the very least, future CA assessments should include dedicated tests for video streaming stability, real-time gaming conditions, and packet-loss-sensitive applications. It would also help to publish time-of-day performance for congested areas, because a network that behaves well on a quiet weekday afternoon can become a circus when everybody logs on in the evening. Consumers deserve to know that. So do businesses building on top of these networks.
The CA’s latest report still has value, and it still tells us something important about operator consistency. But by omitting gaming and video tests tied to jitter and packet loss, it also reveals how outdated telecom quality measurement can become when it fails to keep pace with actual behaviour. Kenya’s mobile users are already living in a more video-heavy, interactive, and latency-sensitive world. The regulator should start measuring it like it already knows that too.
