The firm said Thursday it had abolished the fee, which ranged between Sh5 and Sh25 per transaction, but did not change the withdrawal charges, which ranged between Sh15 and Sh300. “The zero transaction charge applied to any amount sent to the recipients on any network in Kenya,” said managing director Shivan Bhargava in a statement.

The review of the tariffs comes in a year when its rival Safaricom increased the fees for sending and receiving amounts above Sh3,500 in a bid to increase the commissions paid to agents. Safaricom charges between Sh3 and Sh250 for cash transfers.

Safaricom, the market leader with 19 million subscribers, has nearly 40,000 M-Pesa agents leaving the rest of the service providers with 9,000 agents across Kenya.

Airtel says it has 6,000 agents and 4.4 million subscribers. As a result, the bulk of the mobile cash transactions have been restricted in Safaricom’s network.

Airtel is still to understand the Kenya Market. Reducing charges wont cut it. They can as well give free calls and no one will move to their network.

What they need to do is to be creative in product offerings to their customers or identify a niche market and exploit it.

And I'm pissed off with airtel. They just erased my 2.9GB of data and have not returned it, just a word (two weeks ago) that they are looking into it. For all I care right now they might as well pack their bags (or is it masts) and go back to wherever they came from.