Safaricom was the only mobile network operator that recorded gains in call traffic after the regulator deactivated unregistered Sim cards at the beginning of this year.

Its competitors also lost their Short Messaging Service traffic as subscribers dropped their multiple Sim card holding behavior to stick with the big network.

Between January and March,Safaricom recorded increased voice traffic of 5.77 billion minutes up from 5.69 billion in the October to December period. This boosted its voice traffic share to 79.5 per cent from 77.5 per cent, according to the latest statistics from the Communications Commission of Kenya released yesterday.

Calls on the Airtel fell to 838.3 million minutes from 918.6 million bringing its traffic share to 11.5 per cent.

yuMobile traffic fell from 631.9 to 554.9 while Orange's fell 100.4 million to 96.1 million.

Safaricom also gained in SMS hit 3.87 billion messages up fro 3.46 billion. Orange recorded a gain from 17.5 million SMS to 18.4 million text messages. On the other hand Airtel saw a decline in text messages from 164.6 million to 160.2 million while yuMobile lost from 44.1 million to 32.8 million.

The Sim card switch-off meant to curb increasing cases of mobile phone related crimes like dissemination of hate messages, mobile money fraud and kidnappings.

The process saw the total number of mobile subscribers drop by 2.9 per cent from 30.7 million to 29.8 million.

"Despite attractive promotional offers released by operators, subscribers were generally not persuaded enough to take full advantage of them," said CCK in its report.

Pre-paid subscriptions recorded a decline of 3.2 per cent while post-paid subscriptions grew by 29.0 per cent.

"Apart from the impact of SIM deactivation, this decline in pre-paid subscriptions could also have been

occasioned by inactive subscriptions in the networks given that active subscribers are classified as those that have generated income within the last 90 days," CCK report read.

yuMobile was the only operator that gained new subscribers in the period from 3.22 million to 3.24 million while Safaricom lost 400,000 users, Airtel lost 200,000 and Orange about 300 000 subscribers.

The market shares in subscriber numbers remain almost the same with Safaricom gaining some ground from 64.5 to 65.1 per cent. Airtel still has a 16.9 per cent of the subscribers, yuMobile gained to 10.9 per cent while orange lost to 7.1 per cent.