Established in the year 2013, BRCK, the remarkable Kenyan company bringing internet access to East Africa, has acquired Surf, another internet provider, making them the largest public WiFi network in Sub-Saharan Africa.
BRCK was formed by the co-founders of Ushahidi and Nairobi’s iHub as a means of countering Kenya’s notorious power failures with a ruggedized portable hotspot, called BRCK v1. It expanded into education with its Kio Kit that brought multimedia video education into classroom across East Africa. In 2017, it launched a smart system called SupaBRCK which aimed to solve the lack of internet access in Africa by bringing the internet to rural villages.
By acquiring Surf, which is the second-largest public WiFi provider in Kenya, BRCK aims to “grow faster in fixed WiFi locations,” BRCK CEO Erik Hersman told me. “We’re excited about the potential to be across multiple Kenyan cities with this acquisition and to be able to continue growing thing network so quickly.” His plans also include having a new way to enter new geographic markets, starting with fixed WiFi and then with “transportation and edge connectivity”.
The combined companies will now have over 2,000 public hotspots across Kenya, with 500,000 users a month. “This marks an important moment in BRCK’s journey towards meeting Africa’s unique needs and expanding on the continent’s connectivity infrastructure. BRCK believes that the acquisition will go a long way towards supporting Africa’s technological evolution,” Hersman says. For the past year, BRCK has seen month-on-month growth of 20%.
Even though the mobile internet is dominant in Africa, “WiFi is growing,” according to Deloitte’s amusing named “Game of Phones: Deloitte’s Mobile Consumer Survey. The Africa Cut 2015/2016”.
BRCK who have won iF Design Awards 2017 Munich, Germany (10th March 2017),Aegis Graham Bell award 2017 New Delhi, India (9th February 2017), and ITU Telecom World 2016 Bangkok ,Thailand (17th November 2016) are on the cutting edge of frontier market technology needs for connectivity, whether that’s for people or things.