Wananchi Group, owners of the Zuku brand, recorded a painful loss of 24,181 paying subscribers in the three months ending September 2025, with cable TV suffering the heaviest blow of 21,619 cancellations, leaving only 44,593 active TV customers, according to financial filings quietly submitted to the Capital Markets Authority last week.
Fixed internet lines also bled 1,562 users in the same quarter, pushing Zuku’s total home broadband base below the 100,000 mark for the first time since 2019. Customers who spoke to tech bloggers cited endless outages, slow speeds after rain, and aggressive debt-collection calls even when services were down as the final straw.
The core problem lies in Zuku’s ageing hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) network that still relies on copper coaxial cable for the “last mile” into estates and apartments. Former field engineers who left the company this year told journalists that entire neighbourhoods go offline whenever water seeps into old joints or illegal tappers introduce noise into the line.
“We used to call it ‘hunting the snake’ because you could drive around for hours with a signal meter looking for the exact pole where the noise entered,” one ex-technician explained on condition of anonymity.
Meanwhile, newer entrants such as Safaricom Home Fibre, Faiba, Poa Internet and Airtel Fibre are rolling out Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) technology that runs pure fibre all the way to the customer’s living room.
GPON is immune to electrical noise, carries symmetrical gigabit speeds, and costs less to maintain once installed. Safaricom alone added 41,000 new fibre homes in the same quarter Zuku was bleeding customers.
The subscriber exodus comes despite a high-profile ownership change in November 2025 when Mauritius-based Axian Telecom completed its full buyout of Wananchi Group from previous private-equity owners.
Axian executives promised an immediate Ksh8 billion capex injection to migrate thousands of HFC customers onto modern fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) infrastructure starting January 2026. “We know the copper network is holding us back. The migration plan is aggressive and customer-focused,” Axian East Africa CEO Denis Martin told investors in Dar es Salaam last week.
Customer reaction remains sceptical. A subscriber posted a screenshot of his Zuku speed test showing 11 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up during peak hours with the caption “Paying premium for dial-up vibes in 2025”.
Zuku has responded with emergency measures. The company slashed its triple-play bundle from Ksh5,999 to Ksh3,999 in selected estates and introduced a “no-speed-cap” 50 Mbps package for Ksh2,499 to slow the bleeding. Call-centre scripts now include an apology for “temporary noise challenges” and a promise of a fibre upgrade within six months.
Industry analysts say the damage may already be done. Lightstone Consultants estimates Zuku’s national pay-TV market share has fallen from 38 percent in 2022 to under 12 percent today, with most defectors moving to cheaper Android boxes and streaming apps. In fibre internet, Zuku now ranks fifth behind Safaricom, Faiba, Liquid Home and Airtel.
For thousands of remaining loyal customers still stuck on copper lines in estates like Utawala, Pipeline and Syokimau, the wait for Axian’s promised fibre rollout will decide whether Zuku becomes a turnaround story or simply the next big brand to fade in Kenya’s brutally competitive broadband wars.
