Category Posts: Broadband

Yesterday, we attended a Brodacom event where the company announced some new services they will be offering. One new product presented, a gadget Brodacom calls a ‘talking modem’, is primarily a wireless internet modem, which really looks like a phone and that indeed can do voice calls. The ‘talking modem’ is the basis of a more exciting announcement from the company; Brodacom now offers unlimited calls within the network for US $15 a month.

Current download speeds rankings for Africa by Ookla, show that Zimbabwe is now in the top 5 Africa countries with the fastest broadband download speeds on the continent. Ookla runs the popular internet speed testing website, Speedtest.net, and uses the millions of tests carried out on the platform to show the current global rankings for consumer broadband speeds.

I recently attended the NEPAD Business Foundation Implementing ICT Projects in Africa Workshop and the Zimbabwe Investment and Trade Conference. It was interesting to note that the message on ICT had a common theme.

Last week, we visited the Huawei Mobile broadband show that ran from 22nd to 29 February in Harare. The show was held for telecommunication services providers in Zimbabwe and it was meant as a neutral platform for Huawei to showcase its product, both end user consumer products and backend infrastructure products.

Earlier this week we reported that the TelOne had been affected by the EASSy cable breakage between Djibouti and Port Sudan almost 3 weeks ago. We sent TelOne some questions on the extent of disruption that the EASSy issue has caused them. We also asked them if some recent ADSL issues were related to the EASSy cable break.

Yesterday we had the opportunity to attend an event organised by Deloitte Consulting in Harare called “The List”. It’s basically a monthly networking event whose purpose is to link the future leaders of Zimbabwe’s top 100 local and international organisations. Usually, there’s a high profile Zimbabwean business person speaking at these events. Business people like Shingai Mutasa, CEO of Masawara and Nathan Kalumbu, the President of Coca-Cola for Central, East and West Africa have spoken at these events.

About 2 weeks ago a new Internet Access Provider called Aptics started advertising VoIP telephony and ‘4G’ services in the local newspapers. We have tried the Aptics broadband internet before for our primary connection at the office, but then, the company was still providing services primarily through ISPs ZOL and Yo Africa. The company is now going to market directly in addition to the partnerships. We visited them a few days ago to get the full story on what the company is offering and what you the reader should expect and indeed if you should be excited.

It’s now week 3 since it was first reported that an undersea fibre cable on the shores of East Africa was down. Then, it was reported that the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) had broken on 17 February 2012 and that a repair vessel had been sent to fix the problem. Eventually it became clear the situation was worse.

Following the internet slowdown caused by the service disruption on three major undersea cables on the East African coast, the Rwandan telecoms regulator, RURA, and ICT ministry, have issued a directive that requires internet providers in the country to share bandwidth.

One of Zimbabwe’s licensed Internet Access Providers (IAP), Aquiva Wireless, will be launching VoIP services by April this year. We got the news from the company this week that they are finalizing interconnection agreements with some of the existing mobile operators and the fixed line operator (TelOne) and will be launching VoIP commercially in the coming weeks.

Last week, we posted that Telecel Zimbabwe started pushing updates of a co-branded version of the Opera Mini mobile browser to subscriber. The special Opera Mini browser has some Speed Dial shortcuts set to the Telecel website and its social media pages. We contacted Telecel to give us more information and they responded.

Towards the end of last year Zimbabwe’s state owned mobile operator, NetOne, launched its mobile broadband service. Over the weekend this writer decided to test the service and see how it performs.

Stellenbosch, a town in the Western Cape province of South Africa, is set to get a Wi-Fi cloud over it offered in the next six months. According to a report in South African tech news site MyBroadband, The Wi-Fi will be available free of charge to anyone, and users of the service will not be required to register.

The East Africa Submarine System (EASSy) has a section of its undersea fibre cable broken since 17 February 2012. The broken section is between Djibouti and Port Sudan and according to reports, WIOCC, the consortium that owns the cable, has already started efforts to repair the cable.

Yesterday Econet announced it had begun charging for its Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). The service was launched in mid-December last year and ran on trial since for two months. Initially, the trial period was meant to last until the end of December.