2,600 ADSL subscribers in Zimbabwe

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December 19th, 2011

20

Dotmore logoIt’s usually extremely hard to get information from TelOne. No one there will speak on record. Especially about the ADSL service the country’s online fixed line operator launched early this year. So you can imagine our delight when we read a speech presented by the Post and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (POTRAZ) director general, Mr. Charles Sibanda recently at POTRAZ’s 10th birthday.

Speaking at the function the DG disclosed that TelOne has connected only 2,600 ADSL customers so far.

We say ‘only’ because we really thought (and sincerely hoped) the figure was much higher than this. In the same speech, Mr. Sibanda discloses that TelOne has a total fixed line subscriber base of 337,881. That’s tens of thousands less than POTRAZ reported last year in February (386,000 subscribers – Slide 7 in the PowerPoint presentation download).

The declining subscribers is an issue for another story, let’s ignore it for now. The point here is that the total fixed line subscribers figure means just 0.8% of all TelOne subscribers are connected to ADSL. It’s way too low than we expected. We expected a couple of tens of thousands at least.

The DG comments in the speech that there are “good prospects for fixed internet expansion”. Being the man on the inside, we hope he can see it clearly enough the expansion will happen at a significant rate in 2012. We all need more reliable and lower priced internet.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/kmadzima Kuda Madzima

    Disappointing figures… I am sure TelOne can do better than this

  • slackie

    if they offered a white label / resell option to other ISPs their numbers would grow 10x as fast. 

  • Guest

    I’m using ADSL right now it’s working fine 90 % of the time, I reckon people associate anything landline or Telone as being backwards and no longer relevant, ADSL has some what of a setup cost and and a waiting period that would frustrate someone who wants things in an instant, whats in it for someone who has an outstanding landline bill to get proper broadband internet I think there  is also a fear of getting asked to clear arrears that’s something Telone ought to look at. In closing whats so significant about ADSL is it’s over a single hop connection I doubt that other providers can match this at the cost Telone is doing 

  • Sikefula

    i am enjoying telone adsl greatly,the less subscribers the better for me…call me greedy and insensitive but congestion will affect this great service…for once i love the slow pace (read bad marketing) of these prastatals..enjoying whilst it lasts!

  • ngth

    Having used (across a number of ISPs) UHF, Wimax, 3g, “4g”, ADSL and VSAT I have to say ADSL is the best (not necessarily with telone, but they provide the lines).  Yes it goes down at time but is normally fixed in a couple of days but in general it’s speed and reliability is WAY beyond the wireless solutions and is a 10th the price of Fibre, for a small business or home connection this is the way to go.

    Telone need to advertise more and allow other ISPs back on the platform and just collect line rental, them monopolizing the platform may sound like a nice idea but they dont have the marketing or operational capacity to make the most of it.

  • IK

    Believe me they do have the capacity to implement this project. FYI, they have created a separate company specifically for ADSL called Gendex as a partnership with Huawei & others. Reason why they are not marketing aggressively is because they are still sorting the telephone infrastructure to make it reliable. Unlike Ecoweb monopolising their Wimax and higher tariffs, i think its good for Telone and everyone in the long run, more competition, lower tariffs ……

  • slackie

    why don’t they whitelabel it to ISPs ? that works well in all first world countries.

  • slackie

    another question is why don’t they connect to ZINX instead of pushing all local traffic international first. they are never going to be the only isp and should not act as if they are

  • Bruce

    A good point slackie, this is the reason I refuse to move to them completely, ZINX is critical. 

    Another issue is the fact they NAT all their home users, which sure for most is not a problem, but VPN’s become a problem, although if your into downloading “stuff”, this a blessing (no one can tell who did the dirty).

  • Bpondo

    @Slakie u a right a ping test to a local website gives me +500ms, which is not good considering most email recipients are local. They should consider hooking into ZINX first.

  • IK

    We all know what happens if the like of ZOL & Yo jump in…… higher prices! Lets give these Telone guys a chance to prove themselves. 

  • IK

    I agree with you, thats a big negative……

  • Bhinikwa

    Good observation slackie,im quite pissed of by that hopefully they ll resolve the zinx issue, its critical esp being the govt agency & possibly biggest isp soon. Another issue is giving users dynamic ips, you cant run mail servers on that, let alone use ip camera etc. Also maybe a product of NAT-ting is their routers block port 25 inbound, so even if u attempt to run a mail server on an updating dns system instead of ip address, u still get blocked.  

  • Lurker133

    I’d say it’s working over 98% of the time and in terms of fixed internet solutions is there anything cheaper to set up? I don’t remember any noticable setup cost beside the router which was $45 (and probably overpriced at that).

    As for arrears, I don’t think people should expect to get away with not paying their bills just because they’re “too high”. Why use beyond your means to pay anyway?

  • Lurker133

    What’s NAT in lay-speak?

  • Garikai Dzoma

    I love Telone’s ASDL. The speeds are decent and the uptime is way better than Powertel’s.

  • Anonymous

    those guys must be serious, they are wasting their potential

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