Kenya Pipeline Company reported higher profits for its 2025/26 financial year this past week -- the kind of result you'd expect from the state-owned operator that moves petroleum fuel from Mombasa to western Kenya. But buried in those numbers is a second business KPC has spent years quietly building alongside the pipeline itself: wholesale fibre.
A pipeline company selling bandwidth
KPC's total revenue for FY2025/26 came in at KSh42.98 billion, up 9% from KSh39.50 billion the year before, with profit after tax rising 13% to KSh11.6 billion. Almost all of that is still the core petroleum transport business -- throughput of roughly 10.6 billion litres through a 1,342km pipeline network. Fibre, by contrast, brought in KSh349.9 million in income for FY2024/25. It's a tiny slice of a KSh43 billion company, but it's real, growing revenue from a business line that didn't exist a decade ago.
KPC has held a Tier 2 network facilities licence from the Communications Authority of Kenya since 2018, and has used it to lay fibre alongside the pipeline's existing right-of-way from Mombasa through Nairobi to Nakuru, Eldoret and Kisumu. It doesn't sell retail internet connections. It leases dark fibre capacity by the core-kilometre to whoever wants to light it up and run their own network over it -- and Safaricom, Airtel Kenya, MTN Business Kenya, Jamii Telecommunications and Wananchi Telecommunications are all already signed on as customers.
Why KPC is leaning into this now
Back in January 2026, KPC laid out a five-year plan running through 2029/30 that explicitly targets cutting petroleum's share of its revenue from around 95% down to 81%, with fibre and LPG named as the two businesses expected to drive that shift. The plan includes extending the fibre network to at least 18 towns and connecting it to submarine cable landing stations and satellite capacity -- which suggests KPC wants to be more than a backhaul operator riding its own corridor between Mombasa and the west.
One more supplier in an already busy wholesale market
This isn't happening in a vacuum. Kenya's wholesale fibre backbone is also being built out through the World Bank-backed national tender under the Kenya Digital Economy Acceleration Project, Telkom's own backbone push, and new submarine cable capacity landing at Mombasa. What KPC adds to that mix is a structurally different kind of supplier -- a state-owned, non-telecom company monetising infrastructure it was already maintaining for an entirely different reason. More independent fibre on the Mombasa-Nairobi-western Kenya corridor means more route diversity if a cable gets cut, and, in theory, more competitive transit pricing for anyone leasing capacity rather than digging their own trench.
Still a side business, and that's worth remembering
KSh349.9 million against KSh42.98 billion is not a sign KPC is about to out-compete established fibre operators, and most of the towns on its expansion list already have other providers present. For ISPs, the realistic takeaway isn't "a new giant has entered the market" -- it's that there's now one more wholesale option to shop between on routes that used to be a two- or three-operator conversation, and that Kenya's state infrastructure companies are increasingly willing to turn assets already in the ground into a second revenue stream.
Cheaper backhaul only helps if the back office keeps up
Whether the bandwidth comes from KPC, Telkom, or a submarine cable consortium, more wholesale supply only becomes subscriber growth if an ISP can actually onboard, bill and collect from new customers fast enough for that expansion to pay off. That's usually where growing ISPs hit a wall -- not bandwidth, but the manual work of reconciling M-Pesa payments against the right account, tracking who has and hasn't paid, and remembering to disconnect the ones who haven't. XpressRADIUS's real-time RADIUS control, tied directly into M-Pesa and Kopo Kopo payments with automatic disconnect and reconnect, exists so that cheaper upstream capacity actually turns into paying subscribers instead of more admin work.
If your ISP is weighing whether a new wholesale option makes it worth pushing into another town, start a free XpressRADIUS trial and see how fast PPPoE and hotspot billing can scale with you.
Curious how XpressRADIUS handles PPPoE and hotspot billing for growing Kenyan ISPs?
Start a free trial