This year Safaricom reminded me that I joined the network in 2004 on a February date – meaning I have been a loyal customer of the network for 15 years. Year after year however, I have had less and less reasons to stick to the network, and recently the only two reasons I had to remain loyal were 1. My easy to remember phone digits and 2. Flex Bundles. This afternoon however I received a text message from Safaricom reading as follows:
The obvious thing to do after receiving such a text would be to compare the alternative that replaces the Flex bundles with my beloved Flex Bundles, and that’s exactly what I did by dialing the recommended *544#, under which I chose All in One Monthly Bundles Kshs 1000 for “How much do you wish to spend?”, and the options from that were repulsive. For starters, I do not use Safaricom network for Internet Access – never (refer to the recent Airtel Ads) and this is because Faiba offers way way more than Safaricom can ever offer. For example, the All in One Monthly bundles has an option where for Kshs 1000 one may chose to spend the entire amount on 5GB data. However, for the exact same amount on Faiba Internet, I get 25GB data – which is 5 times more than Safaricom’s offer.
What I use my Safaricom line for is to make calls, and I do this with the Flex Bundles. The beauty of Flex Bundles has been that when you buy them, you have the freedom to spend all of it either on text, SMS, or data or spend it on a mix of either of the two or the three services at will. That is, whenever you use Flex for voice, 3 Flex Bundles are deducted per minute of call, or spend it on data and get 3 MBs for every Flex Bundle, or spend it on text and get 3 text messages for every Flex Bundle. This freedom has however been deleted in the All in One Monthly Bundles where the only good option is where you can decide to spend all your bundles on the 5GB Internet Data.
Now that I want an option where I can get the maximum voice minutes, the All in One Monthly Bundles only allows me to spend Kshs 1000 on 400 minutes, which sounds lucrative … however, if I choose that option, I shall have lost a whooping 1GB data and 1000 text messages, something no one would like to throw away just like that.
So this is what I have decided, until Safaricom introduces an option where the All in One Monthly Bundles can have an option where one chooses 100% voice minutes, something like 500 minutes for Kshs 1000, I totally and completely have no reason to stick with the network. Airtel for instance already offers very lucrative voice minutes that I am going to subscribe to immediately my current Flex Bundles either get exhausted or expire.
