When I switched to Safaricom’s 5G router, I thought I had finally escaped the nightly internet misery that had pushed me away from Airtel 5G. For months, that mostly proved true. As I noted in my detailed review of the Safaricom Baicells 5G router, the experience had been largely solid, especially compared to what I had endured before.
But over the past few days, things have started feeling uncomfortably familiar.
My main reason for moving from Airtel’s 5G router to Safaricom’s 5G router was simple: Airtel became almost unusable at night. During the day, it would mostly behave. I could research, write, browse, and do normal internet things. But once the clock hit around 6 pm or 7 pm, speeds would collapse. This would often continue until around 10 pm, when the connection suddenly stabilized again, as if the internet had gone for prayers and returned refreshed.
At the time, I suspected network congestion. After all, 7 pm to 10 pm is when many people are back home, streaming, browsing, gaming, scrolling, video-calling, and generally reminding cell towers that humanity was a design mistake.
Safaricom’s 5G router gave me a fresh start. I specifically picked the Baicells unit because I liked the idea of battery backup, something I had already appreciated with Airtel’s router. I have since switched between Safaricom’s base 15Mbps plan and the 50Mbps plan, eventually settling on the 15Mbps package because it fits my usage patterns.
For a while, everything was fine. But lately, evenings have become a problem.
The issue usually begins when I settle down to stream something around 7 pm. Apps start buffering. YouTube struggles. Movies refuse to load properly. At first, I assumed it was just the apps having issues, because naturally, the first instinct is to blame the software. But after running repeated speed tests when the buffering starts, a clear pattern has emerged: my Safaricom 5G router internet becomes painfully slow at night.
Last night was especially frustrating. I was trying to watch Crime 101, but the stream kept buffering so badly that after about an hour, I had only managed around 12 minutes of actual playback.
The speed test results were brutal. One Fast.com test at 8:21 pm showed download speeds of just 320Kbps, with loaded latency hitting 806ms. Another Google internet speed test at 8:36 pm showed 0.33Mbps download and 0.99Mbps upload. A later Fast.com test at 8:47 pm dropped further to 200 Kbps, while Speedtest at 8:50 pm showed an even worse 0.03 Mbps download, with a ping of 899ms.
This morning, the same setup was back to behaving normally. A Speedtest result showed 14.93Mbps download and 14.96Mbps upload, which is exactly the kind of performance I expect on the base 15Mbps plan.
That difference is the real issue here. This does not feel like a router that is constantly bad. It feels like a connection that collapses during specific evening hours, then recovers later or by morning. And that is what makes it so frustrating.
I have also contacted Safaricom support multiple times when this happens. On one occasion, they reset the router, but by the time I saw the message, it was the following morning and the connection was fine again. Earlier this week, my reports were ignored. The same happened last night.
To be clear, I have done my own troubleshooting. I have restarted the router multiple times, switched between 5G-only, 4G-only, 5G/4G, and 5G/4G/3G modes, and tested both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi bands. None of these fixes the problem when the slowdown hits. Also, there is a Safaricom booster literally next to me, so poor signal should not be the easy explanation here.
What bothers me most is that this mirrors the same pattern I experienced with Airtel 5G. It starts well, then at some point, evening speeds begin collapsing. The timing is also suspiciously similar: roughly between 7 pm and 10 pm.
So, is this congestion? Is it a capacity issue? Is it something about how both networks handle evening traffic in high-usage areas? (FYI, I’m somewhere in Vihiga county, nowhere near a high-usage area.) I cannot say with certainty from one household’s experience. But I can say this: the pattern has become too common to ignore.
I would like to hear from other Safaricom 5G router users. Are you also experiencing painfully slow speeds at night, especially between 7 pm and 10 pm? Does your connection recover later in the night or by morning? And if you previously used Airtel 5G, did you experience the same thing there too?
Share your experience in the comments below. Because if this is happening to more people, then it is no longer just my router acting up. It becomes a bigger question about whether Kenya’s 5G home broadband internet networks are starting to buckle during peak evening hours.
