Safaricom Weekly Unlimited Data Plan Review
By Dennis Mayeku
After months of playing safe against Safaricom’s fishy line “Virtually Unlimited Internet”, I took a bold step to purchase the weekly unlimited internet plan for KES 1,000. Purchasing the Safaricom weekly unlimited internet is as simple as sending a text message 1000 to 450.
This is not my first purchase of an internet package from Safaricom, I have bought several fixed data bundles before and the speeds on 3G were just amazing. I could go as high as 3.2Mbps at night and very rare lows of 700kbps. Am a heavy Internet user kind of customer and having experienced the speeds of Safaricom 3G, I was overjoyed when Safaricom announced a true unlimited weekly and monthly plan a few months ago.
Impatiently, I loaded my Safaricom 3G modem with 1k credit and swiftly sent an activation message for the weekly unlimited plan. Am used to waiting for 5-10 minutes for Safaricom to process my daily internet data bundles but this was different! A pop-up message from Safaricom appeared on my modem console before I could even minimize the window, that was the green light for me to fire up my modem and launch my favorite browser.
A disappointment
Safaricom Weekly Unlimited Speedtest
I had several videos to watch from Youtube and an endless “shopping” list of “2011″ movies to download from our lifesaver file sharing sites. I was disappointed when my homepage Youtube took more than fifteen seconds to fully load. Having grown up in Africa, I opened another webpage in a new tab just to confirm the Internet had not “vanished” I was once more disappointed. I tried downloading a file from Filehippo.com and the average speed ranged between 30-50 kbps. With these speeds, a 700MB file would take almost 12 Hours to complete downloading. This is hardly impressive especially if you are used to the speeds offered by Safaricom on their data bundles or other Internet Service Providers in Kenya such as KDN and Accesskenya.
I later found out that Safaricom has restricted it’s Weekly and Monthly unlimited plans to a mere 128Kbps. So you should expect to do about 50Kbps on Safaricom 3G network out of Nairobi and lower if the 3G signal is weak or absent.
Activating Safaricom Weekly PLan
From your modem or phone, send an SMS with 1000 to code 450. The bundle costs KES 1,000 and takes exactly 168 Hours (1 Week) to expire.
Pros
- Excellent Internet stability: Safaricom Internet is always alive anytime you need it, just plug in your modem and you will be ready to cross the world. There was no single time I wanted to surf the net and my modem couldn’t connect.
- The Safaricom weekly plan is basically for students and professionals who want to access the Internet anywhere on the move. It’s also good for bloggers, web designers and sales people who need to log in to some website and make updates just as the need arises.
Cons
- Not recommended for heavy Internet users. You will be disappointed.
- Expensive. A thousand shillings is just too high for one week of 128kbps speeds. If you are a permanent home user, go for KDN’s SoHo where 256kbps goes for KES 999 a month.
