Kenya: Zuku Employees Allegedly Stealing Internet From the Company

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Zuku is a company that has taken a lot of heat, especially in relation to their internet service offering. Scouting through Zuku’s official accounts on Facebook and Twitter and you will be guaranteed of not less than 5 recent complains of slow internet and in some cases, no internet access at all. The company has tried a couple of measures to improve its services, including making changes to their monthly packages, all to no avail.

Just to give you the context of what I am talking about, here are a few complains I found:

So when a Techweez Forums user shared information that some of Zuku employees could be responsible for the company’s woes, it all made sense. It has been alleged that some Zuku employees have become cartels in
some way, they are opening up cyber cafes and connecting their business premise to Zuku Fiber for free and some have even started redistributing the internet via high-end Wi-Fi extenders, popularly known as nano stations, purporting to be Tier 3 ISPs (Internet Service Providers), without the consent of the company.

Our tipster narrates his story:

A few months ago I told you about it how one cyber I know about have refused to tell me about their internet plan only to learn later that the owner works for Zuku and net in his cyber is directly stolen from Zuku.

Once hooked up to another nano station WLAN home internet and the guy lied to me that their ISP is Liquid Telcom only to learn later that it’s Zuku. The connectivity was so bad that I declined to pay fully for the service as agreed after four days of trying the service. Only used the internet for 4 hours on day one, the rest of the three days there was no connection.

If indeed these allegations are true, it would shine some light as to why Zuku’s internet service is always slow. Let me explain briefly by using an example; Let’s say Zuku knows it has 15 customers in area X, it will only provide bandwidth to cater for these 15 customers. However, if the said Zuku employees turned cartels steal internet from the company, area X will have 30 customers, 15 of which Zuku knows nothing about. Thus the bandwidth that was meant to be shared by 15 customers is now being shared by 30, the result? Extremely slow internet.

The big question remains, is Zuku aware of these “intrapreneurial” activities going on among its employees?

9 COMMENTS

  1. Liquid Telecom has long suffered from this issue. They recently restructured their offering hence introduction of Hai due to excessive revenue leaks.

  2. So the illegal clients are paying their monthly charges to who? And i thought fibre has an extremely large bandwidth capacity. Clarify on that.

    • They are not illegal clients. We can call them unknowing clients. For example, I come and propose to you that I can give you unlimited internet for 1k a month but you don’t know it’s source all you care for is to have the internet.

      Payments are made to the employees that are distributing the internet illegally.

    • The issue is not the capacity that fibre can carry but the number of people that can share a particular amount of bandwidth allocated to them by the ISP.

  3. lol and here I was wondering why I have to make an enquiry every couple of weeks. Not that bad at Kahawa Sukari – I’ll keep out an eye for this!

      • For Starters, the story is trying to bring out an issue of lack of service provision by the ISP – Slow Speeds and Constant Interruptions – Which should

        have been the central theme.

        It would have been prudent for the writer to get a background of how the Zuku Fiber technology works , the bottlenecks they experience,

        Why the clients complain of slows speeds, any bandwidth controls….something along those lines.

        The writer should get a comment from an official from the company on why they constantly get complaints and if they are working on the complaints

        The article just shows how clueless the writer is.

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