Safaricom reported record data traffic on Sunday, at the height of the finals of two major continental tournaments in Europe and America – with many Kenyans opting to live stream matches on mobile phones and tablets.
The telecom company’s disclosures indicate that data traffic flowing through its network during the Spain-England match in Berlin reached 3.96 terabytes, the highest level since the company was founded two and a half decades ago.
The telecom company says it achieved this feat thanks to its heavy investments in more cable networks.
This helped reduce latency, which is the delay before data transfer begins after receiving instructions to transfer it.
“This is very exciting for us as we have had no issues or complaints as Kenyans stream quality football from overseas using the submarine cable network we have invested heavily in,” said George Njuguna, the company’s chief technology and information officer.
Explaining the scale of the event, Safaricom says it will take up to 100,000 phones, each with 128GB of storage, to store all the data that was flowing through its network on Sunday night.
The telecom company added that as of the beginning of this year, its total international data volume amounted to about 500 GB.
This capacity has since been increased to 700GB.
Safaricom currently boasts six subsea cables, the largest compared to other players in the region.
“Every time we stream matches, this information comes from data centres located outside the continent most of the time.
“This means that we have to have a submarine cable network with sufficient capacity to carry data because there are times and there are some networks that cannot broadcast over it,” Njuguna added.
The company says it has continued to update its network locations in an effort to avoid congestion during data sessions.
The site’s cables are increasingly connected to content data networks brought into the country by companies such as Google, Meta and X.