Fully agree with you, but in any case, subscribers win!

Subscribers are laughing all the way. That aside, in a few months (weeks?), when making a call or sending SMS, it will not matter, price-wise, which network one is on. The difference may be in terms of cents. The bigger picture is even more important. Faced with declining voice and SMS revenues, all the players will have to give us quality product portfolios, assured network quality (dropped calls will not do, we can afford to switch and hey, its not enough to claim "Strongest Network" - Prove it!). We will have to be accorded good customer care (waiting on the IVR queue for 10 minutes listening to stories from some women with exotic accents is a no-no) and generally we expect(nay, we demand) to be treat like humans.

Customer is King.

They have to get out there and look for practical every-day solutions which can be tailored to the Kenyan mobile market. It is survival of the fittest, in this case, the most innovative. I expect a flurry of services mostly data-based. Corporate communication WANs will need to evolve faster.IT managers who are usually attended to by some dim-wit in the name of Corporate Support now wield power. For the first time, we really are spoilt for choice.

On another front, local content and mobile apps developers may soon become premium talent. For a long time, the techies have been ignored or treated shabbily in deed. They are talented, have great ideas that can change the social and economic outlook of the masses, yet the mobile operators do not see the need to engage them. Case in point, how many telcos have seen the value in providing open APIs? I have heard all manner of excuses about security and privacy of networks but surely, there are technical controls for that kind of threats. How come Vodafone, BT and Orange run open APIs for "Betavine", "Ribbit" and "Partner" platforms respectively? Even GSM Association is aggresively pushing the OneAPI project....The feeble attempts to engage developers will now have to change. How long does it take Safaricom or Zain to respond to a business proposal? When they do, it is probably a half-hearted acknowledgement and if the proposal goes through, the revenue share is tilted in their favor. Business partnerships will be key.

So, beyond the much publicised price wars and past the noise and media antics, I hope mobile operators realize that the journey has just commenced. I wonder who will fall by the way-side, but I know somebody will.