Rogue cable firms and ISPs face jail terms, hefty fines

A water fountain at the entrance of the Communications Authority of Kenya. [File, Standard]

Kenya’s telecommunications boom has turned city skylines into a chaotic tangle of drooping cables and turned pavements in urban and rural areas into a patchwork of torn-up trenches.

Now, the government is ordering the industry to clean up, or else they face penalties, including the loss of licences. 

The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) has issued sweeping new rules compelling cable companies and internet service providers (ISPs) to share infrastructure, from wooden poles to underground ducts, in a bid to end what regulators call “visual pollution,” costly duplication, and repeated service disruptions.

This comes at a time the country has witnessed an explosion of internet services and high-speed broadband in recent years, driven by surging demand for streaming, mobile money and cloud computing. 

But that growth has come at an aesthetic and environmental cost. Streets in Nairobi’s suburbs are lined up with multiple poles sagging under the weight of cables from different providers.

Pavements have been destroyed as each firm repeatedly digs its own trenches.  

The new guidelines, published in a 15-page document seen by Financial Standard, try to sort out the mess mandating sharing, setting minimum heights and depths, and requiring all lines to be clearly labelled. 

The regulator said it was forced to act because the industry could not police itself. 

“The authority has noted the proliferation of cables not only installed with disregard for the manufacturer standards, but also poorly maintained,” the document states.

“Most cable installation companies lack internal quality assurance measures.” 

The guidelines derive their legal force from the Kenya Information and Communications Act, 1998, according to the document. Any violation of the installation rules constitutes an offence under that Act and its subsequent revisions. 

Offenders face financial penalties of up to Sh5 million for certain violations. Non-compliance can also be treated as a criminal offence, with imprisonment ranging from one year to life, CA said. 

Under the new Technical and Procedural Guidelines for Installation and Maintenance of Cable Telecommunication Infrastructure, 2026, the days of exclusive infrastructure are over. 

A maximum of ten different providers can now share a single pole – up from no legal limit before. Each pole may have only one slack loop (extra cable length for future repairs), meaning sharing providers must alternate their slack coils. 

Under the new rules, every trench must contain at least four ducts (plastic or concrete pipes laid inside a trench that protect fibre or copper cables and allow multiple cables to be pulled through without digging again) – enough for several operators to share the same hole in the ground.  

Rigid spacers between ducts must be placed every two metres, and the trench must be at least 2.5 feet wide to accommodate sharing. 

Aerial cables must now hang at least 23 feet above ground, 18 feet over roads and railways, and 13 feet over estate gate entrances, ending the sight of cables so low they snag trucks and lorries. 

Underground lines must be buried at least three feet deep, preventing easy damage from shallow digging. 

Every cable must carry a permanent weather-resistant strip every 300 feet (about 90 metres), showing the owner’s name, fibre count, cable type and installation date.

Abandoned “orphan” cables – a longstanding hazard – can now be identified and removed. 

Telecommunication cables sharing electricity poles must maintain a minimum vertical separation of three feet from power lines, and must use All-Dielectric Self‑Supporting cables – a fibre cable with no metal components, preventing dangerous electrical interference. 

After completing a build, firms must notify the CA within 14 days and submit self-test reports including optical power measurements, signal attenuation tests, and photographic evidence of labelling and grounding.

The CA will then carry out a certification exercise before any service can go live – a step that did not exist before. 

Any firm wishing to install or operate infrastructure must now hold a Network Facility Provider licence. Contractors and technical personnel must be individually licensed. 

Before digging, companies must obtain permits from county governments, road authorities, Kenya Power, the National Environment Management Authority, and others – and attach all approvals to their CA application. 

The guidelines enshrine a “Dig-Build Once” policy, forcing companies to coordinate trenching to avoid the repeated excavation that has choked traffic.

Service providers must state in writing the sharing capacity of their proposed infrastructure and justify why sharing is not possible on any given route. 

For consumers, the changes, CA reckons, promise fewer traffic jams from roadworks, fewer outages from severed cables, and a skyline that is no longer cluttered with what the regulator now formally calls “visual pollution.”  

Existing infrastructure that does not conform must be regularised within six months. After that, non‑compliant cables could face sanctions. 

The authority said it will review the guidelines periodically as technology evolves.