Airtel Kenya has moved beyond pilot phases to begin a commercial rollout of its Xstream Fibre broadband service across selected areas of Nairobi and other towns, making its first concerted push into the fixed internet market that Safaricom has long dominated.
More than 400 buildings in Nairobi are already connected, according to an Airtel agent, with installation fees waived for both residential and business customers to reduce the cost of switching. The service covers both Fibre to the Home (FTTH) and Fibre to the Business (FTTB) connections, with routers supplied by Huawei and ZTE at no upfront cost. Customers pay only from the first monthly subscription, which triggers installation and activation.
Airtel has structured four pricing tiers: KES 1,999 (approximately $15.50) for 15 Mbps, KES 2,999 for 30 Mbps, KES 3,999 for 60 Mbps, and KES 4,999 (approximately $38.75) for 100 Mbps. The entry-level pricing undercuts several comparable plans in the market and places Airtel squarely in the segment where demand is most concentrated.
The rollout has been deliberately quiet. Rather than a formal launch, Airtel showcased the Xstream Fibre brand publicly at the Connected Africa Summit in Nairobi in late April 2026, where promotional material confirmed the service was already live in select residential areas. Managing Director Ashish Malhotra described the fibre expansion as a “work in progress” and indicated an official launch would follow.
The groundwork traces back to September 2025, when Airtel Kenya broke ground on its $150 million Nxtra Data Centre at Tatu City in Nairobi. At the time, Malhotra linked the fibre rollout to the company’s broader investment in digital infrastructure, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence workloads, and enterprise connectivity.
Airtel’s model differs from incumbents. Rather than pursuing the fibre-to-the-home approach favoured by established operators, the company is concentrating on fibre-to-the-building, in which a single connection serves an entire apartment block. The architecture reduces rollout costs and speeds up coverage, though it shifts the quality of the final connection to each unit onto a building’s internal infrastructure. The focus on multi-dwelling units rather than individual home installations is designed to secure higher subscriber volume per building.
In parallel, Airtel is revising its fixed wireless product after complaints about indoor 5G performance. It is replacing the current setup with an external outdoor receiver paired with an indoor router, both supplied at no upfront cost, to stabilise speeds in areas where fibre has not yet arrived.
Kenya’s fixed internet market had reached 2,461,981 subscriptions by the end of December 2025, with fibre connections accounting for 1,378,198 of those and growing 8.3 percent quarter-on-quarter, according to the Communications Authority of Kenya. Safaricom leads the sector with a 34.9 percent share of subscriptions, followed by Jamii Telecommunications Limited (20.1%), Wananchi Group (11.1%), Poa Internet (10.7%), and Ahadi Wireless (9.0%). Airtel does not yet appear in the leading operators table, meaning its gains will come entirely from winning market share rather than defending it.
The competitive response has already begun. After Airtel’s pricing became public, Safaricom increased speeds on its home fibre plans without raising prices, a move analysts read as a direct reaction to the new entrant.
Airtel’s pricing and zero-cost onboarding model offer a credible proposition to price-sensitive customers in densely populated urban areas. Whether that is enough to build lasting scale will depend on coverage depth, installation reliability, and its ability to secure landlord agreements across the apartment blocks it is targeting.
