NAIROBI, November 20 – About 250,000 potential subscribers’ signed up for the new ‘Yu’ brand from Econet Wireless within three hours of its activation, officials of the mobile service operator have revealed.
Econet Wireless CEO and Director of ‘yu’ Mr Michael Foley said on Thursday that they were overwhelmed by the huge number of subscribers who logged on to reserve their numbers on the network.
“The web portal has received a peak of over 250,000 concurrent hits by potential subscribers as at 10am this morning,” he said of the ‘yu reserve your number campaign’ which kicked off on Thursday.
By reserving their numbers, potential ‘yu’ subscribers will retain their previous numbers and can also afford to customise their numbers.
The campaign has an online reservation option on the web portal www.yu.co.ke and Mr Foley construed this to mean that this was an affirmation of the confidence that Kenyans have about the new network.
“We’ve had to step up the database capacity as we’ve already hit targets set for an entire week. We will also have over 200 customer care desks running by next week to take care of all the queries our customers shall raise,” he added.
The official network service launch of the brand is set for November 28 and it will be operating under the 0750, 0751, 0752 prefix numbers effectively making Econet the fourth mobile operator in Kenya.
The new brand primarily targets the youthful segment of the population and will initially be rolled out in Nairobi and Mombasa ahead of a full scale national roll-out within the first quarter of 2009.
It has been launched in Kenya under Essar Global Limited, which has invested in Econet Wireless International as part of a Pan African GSM mobile network rollout bid by Essar.
