Kenya – Low-Cost ISP Poa! Internet Bags U.S.$28 Million in Funding to Expand Its Coverage Across the Country

There is a small group of African ISPs that are doing the 'heavy lifting' of addressing lower income customers. poa! Internet is one of them and it has just raised US$28 million to increase its scale. Russell Southwood spoke to CEO Andy Halsall about what the company has planned and the current state of the market.

When Covid-19 hit poa! Internet was in the process of going out to raise its next financing round. Inevitably it has had to throttle back on its ambitions over the main period of the pandemic: "We're not growing as quickly as we did pre-Covid. We have had to control CAPEX spend and not burn out early. It's been slightly frustrating."

The good news has been that existing customers have been using a great deal more data, moving from 160 GB per month pre-Covid to 220 GB during Covid. Better still these increased volumes have continued: "It's only going one way."

Its current footprint is semi-informal settlements in Nairobi and surrounding areas, the latest being Donholm, Jogoo Road and Umoja. Currently it reaches 200,000 homes with an estimated 750,000 people. Its list of places earmarked for further expansion are more communities in Nairobi and other urban areas like Mombasa and other towns. Once that part of the expansion is complete it will look at other African countries.

Its primary service is residential home broadband, for which it has 12,000 customers. But it started with Wi-Fi hot-spots and they continue to play an important role as a customer pipeline. There are currently 50,000 hot-spot customers. Its products are targeted at the lower income, "low-end middle class". Its customers are relatively young (in their 20s), still single or living with their family and relatively tech-savvy.

Any registered customer can get 100MB a day of free data: "We want to shift people to the mindset of consuming a lot of data. Currently most people don't have fibre to the home and their experience is using expensive 4G mobile data in bundles. Using the internet is about consuming more data than you would using mobile bundles." This is why the average data use by Safaricom mobile customers is in the hundreds of MBs rather than GBs.

According to Halsall, poa! Internet customers "use the internet like people do elsewhere. They stream movies, educate their kids, do Zoom calls, all those sort of things. Their profile is very similar to someone in California. The volume driver is downloading movies and YouTube. These activities are just not viable on 4G mobile."

The data market in Kenya continues to evolve. The volume operators are Safaricom and Airtel. The former has 16 million plus mobile data subscribers and continues to dominate the market. But it and most of the household fibre providers (for example, JTL's Faiba and Zuku) are focused on high-end neighborhoods and fibre roll-outs and footprint expansion have slowed down: "Everyone has done well out of Covid-19." These increased volumes have seen wholesale bandwidth prices drop by an estimated 5-10%.

The kick-starter of its finance process was winning an innovation challenge run by Africa 50, who put it into its investment pipeline. It has now raised US$28 million to finance its expansion plans.

The key takeaway is that household fibre is starting to scale rapidly:"Fibre is now passing something like 0.5-0.75 million households and the total market might be somewhere between 1-1.5 million households. There are 10 million who won't get fibre (through existing investment choices). These are the communities we're trying to connect. 4G/.5G won't be used for streaming and that's where we come in."

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