Users of public Wi-Fi services offered in various parts of Nairobi by internet service provider Poa will have to find alternative means of staying online over the next two weeks.
This is after the ISP announced the suspension of its public Wi-Fi services until April 15th.
The ISP says that its public Wi-Fi network, dubbed Poa Street, is undergoing maintenance, occasioning the outage.
“We are implementing an important network upgrade which will affect all our 25,000 Poa Street hotspots. All Poa Street services will therefore be unavailable until 15th April,” a notice from the ISP to its users reads.
Poa Internet’s public Wi-Fi costs Kshs 20 for a gigabyte of data after one exhausts the 100 megabytes it offers for free. Its fixed internet subscribers access these public hotspots for free.
Poa Internet is the third largest fixed internet service provider in the country, after Safaricom and Zuku, as per the latest data from the Communications Authority of Kenya, with a 15% market share and over 120,000 subscribers.
Poa Internet grew has grown in popularity by offering affordable internet (at Kshs 1,500 per month) in various low and middle-income neighbourhoods within the Nairobi city area like Githurai, Kawangware, Kasarani, Utawala, Donhom and Umoja as well as the city’s outskirts like Ngong and Rongai.
Last year, on the sidelines of the US-Africa Leaders Summit, the United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) offered Poa Internet a grant of an undisclosed amount to fund a market assessment in 14 African countries that will see it come up with a shortlist of three best African markets it can expand to outside Kenya.
Recently, there has been an increase in the number of complaints from customers of the fixed internet service regarding the degraded quality of service on their connections. Similarly, there has been an increase in the number of reported cases of Poa Internet equipment being stolen, thereby disrupting service provision.
