Airtel is closing its Kenyan wholesale fibre company after two years and no revenue

Airtel Africa is pulling the plug on a Kenyan wholesale fibre business that spent more than two years on the books without generating commercial revenue. Airtel Kenya Telesonic Limited is handing its licence back to the Communications Authority and packing it up.

Telesonic was supposed to be Airtel's dedicated wholesale arm here. Wholesale internet means selling massive bandwidth pipes to other businesses. We are talking about internet providers, rival mobile operators, banks and data centres. Nobody is running a cable from this company into your living room. Telesonic was built to operate at the infrastructure level, completely separate from the home internet packages you might actually buy.

In Kenya, that business never recorded a shilling of revenue. Its first batch of accounts, covering July 2022 to the end of 2023, shows how little activity the company had generated. The company recorded zero revenue and a tiny net loss of KSh38,406. What it did have was a network facilities licence booked at KSh15 million. That permit was supposed to last for fifteen years starting in January 2025.

The KSh14 Million Write-Off

Airtel surrendered the licence before the first year of its 15-year term was complete.

Surrendering the permit forced Telesonic to write off its remaining value. The company recorded a KSh14 million write-off in 2025, pushing accumulated losses to KSh19.08 million. By the end of the year, the company was sitting on roughly KSh284,275 in cash.

Add in a KSh18.5 million debt owed to sister company Airtel Networks Kenya, and that left Telesonic with negative equity. Its 2025 accounts were prepared on a liquidation basis rather than as a going concern. The wind-down was mostly just paperwork. Airtel returned the physical licence booklet on February 6, and the board voted to close up shop that same afternoon.

By the time Telesonic's licence became operational, Kenya's wholesale connectivity market already had established players including Safaricom, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, SEACOM and Bayobab. Telesonic's accounts do not explain why it failed to secure customers. They show only that the company generated no commercial revenue before surrendering its licence.

Airtel is not leaving Kenya's fibre market, however. Its consumer arm, Airtel Networks Kenya, is still pushing the retail Xstream Fibre service, connecting apartment buildings and offices across Nairobi with packages running up to 100 Mbps.

Kenya had 2,656,653 fixed internet subscriptions in March 2026, with 1,474,201 of those on fibre. Safaricom holds 35.4% of that space, followed by Faiba at 19.5%, Zuku at 10.4% and Poa at 9.7%. Airtel does not currently feature in the top ten.

Telesonic is therefore coming to an end without ever recording commercial revenue. Airtel Networks Kenya, meanwhile, continues to build its Xstream Fibre business in a retail market where Safaricom, Faiba, Zuku and Poa already account for the largest shares of fixed internet subscriptions.