Safaricom 2018 Sustainable Business Report

38 INTRODUCTION OUR BUSINESS OUR MATERIAL TOPICS STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT 2018 SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS REPORT We are delighted to be able to report that we have made excellent progress in terms of expanding our fibre optic network again this year, surpassing even the achievements of FY17. We laid an additional 769 kilometres of fibre optic cables during the year and our network is now 5,469 kilometres in length and connects 72 cities in 46 counties. We have also connected 50% of our sites (BTS) to the network. In terms of enterprise buildings, we deployed the network in three new towns during the year — Bungoma, Kitale and Nyeri — and exceeded our target of connecting 1,850 enterprise buildings connected by 72 to bring the total of connected buildings to 7,117. We were able to achieve this because partners and materials were secured early in the year and thanks to a focus on acquiring buildings during construction, which is typically a faster process than acquiring existing buildings. In terms of residential homes, we surpassed our achievements in FY17 and passed an additional 100,000 homes. Again, this was achieved as a result of early deployment of materials, along with the on-boarding of two additional partners. NETWORK AVAILABILITY AND STABILITY The stability and availability of our network remains a critical necessity. Any interruption in energy supply, such as grid electricity outages and national shortages of diesel fuel, poses a direct challenge to the continuity of our operations. We continue to manage our response to this issue primarily through our Service Unavailability Rate (SUR). Our SUR is calculated by dividing the minutes of downtime per week per network element by the number of sites in our network. FY18 FY17 FY16 FY15 Radion Access Network Service Unavailability Rate (SUR) - (minutes) 22.2 22.9 41.5 60* * SUR measurement started midway through the financial year. As the preceding table (left) and graph (above) show, the SUR for the Radio Access Network improved slightly during the year, reducing from 22.9 minutes in FY17 to 22.2 minutes in FY18. We are not satisfied with this result, however, and will redouble our efforts to achieve a SUR of below 15 minutes in FY19. Our progress was hampered again this year by power outages and transmission failures. The network outage that occurred S D G 9 Service Unavailability Rate (SUR) 0 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 YEAR SERVICE UNAVAILABILITY RATE (minutes) FY15 60 41.5 22.9 22.2 FY16 FY17 FY18