Tag Posts: Africom

In October 2010, Africom made a bold unprecedented move in the history of the internet in Zimbabwe. Fresh from the launch of its new red brand and mobile broadband services, the company announced the pricing of its data packages; the cost of a 1 gigabyte bundle was US $18. It was crazy. It was fantastic for the customers. We celebrated. For the first time in Zimbabwe, here was a company that understood that the internet was not a luxury for rich.

A year ago, US $50 per month unlimited broadband was only offered by one internet provider, the state owned PowerTel. Many would argue doesn’t really ‘need’ to make money. It wasn’t the best internet in town, largely because of congestion issues, but PowerTel afforded many small businesses and middle income earners an opportunity to have their own internet connection for the first time. The rest of the providers had prices north of $100 for any type broadband, forget unlimited.

There’s some good news we’re discovering as the year comes to an end. YoAfrica, one of the biggest internet service providers in Zimbabwe, has slashed its home broadband internet offering to US $50 a month. And if a customer pays for a whole year (which we don’t advise by the way) the price drops further to $42 a month.

When Africom unveiled its mobile broadband service pricing last year in October it was to the delight of a market frustrated by exorbitantly priced internet (in the case of Econet) or just internet that didn’t work much (hello PowerTel).

We commented then that on price Africom’s service was “by far a preferable alternative”. We still believe so.

The guys over at Candid Consumerism posted last week that the Buy Zimbabwe people were being hypocritical telling everyone to buy Zimbabwean products yet Buy Zimbabwe itself is not. Buy Zimbabwe won’t eat its own dog food. Its website is hosted in the United States. If they were being sincere, the article says, they’d just host it locally; Buy Zimbabwe would just buy Zimbabwean hosting.

One of the main highlights of last year’s ICT Africa was the launch of Africom mobile broadband services. The service launched with a one month free bandwidth offer. Before Africom’s product came along, mobile broadband in Zimbabwe was only offered by Econet, PowerTel and TelOne. None of the three incumbents offered reliable connectivity so the Africom’s entry was much welcomed.

There’s one thing we love about two of Zimbabwe’s largest ISPs, YoAfrica and ZOL. It is that they understand the difference between local and international traffic. That local traffic does not cost them much to deliver and can therefore be given away free to customers. Aptics, a relatively new Internet Access Provider understands this too.

Today, Africom sent a message to its customers through SMS announcing that the Africom CDMA network is now officially interconnected with the Econet mobile network and the TelOne fixed line network. This in addition to the existing Telecel interconnection. Africom also took the opportunity to remind the market that making calls to other networks costs only US 12 cents, less than half of what the incumbent GSM operators currently charge.

The need to have local Zimbabwean content on the internet has been widely discussed. The main idea being that the internet will become more relevant to locals if it has content people have traditionally consumed on platforms like TV, radio, newspapers, books and so forth.

Speaking at a Computer Society of Zimbabwe function yesterday, Spiritage Communications Managing Director Mr. Kangai Maukazuva disclosed the company has deployed a 3.9G network. Maukazuva was presenting the topic “Communication technologies for the future” to a huge group of information technology professionals. The presentation centered on the evolution in telecommunications to next generation networks (NGNs).

Africom’s ZTE supplied modems are having compatibility issues when connected to Windows Home 7 machines. The problem occurs when the connect button is clicked on the dongle’s menu, leading to that most hated of Windows menaces; a blue screen. We visited the Africom shop along Jason Moyo Avenue on Friday and were immediately surprised by the lack of staff at the often congested shop.

PowerTel Communications, the state owned subsidiary of national power company, ZESA, is set to launch mobile voice services on its network. PowerTel sales and marketing manager, Willard Nyagwande made the announcement at a function in Harare yesterday.

Going to the Spiritage offices physically is what we had to do to get the tariffs for below. The tariffs are basically the same as what was published by Valley Technologies back in April.

When Africom launched its mobile phone service last month, it conspicuously lacked one thing any mobile operator needs to offer voice – Interconnection to other operators. The company only had live interconnection to the country’s smallest mobile operator (by number of subscribers), Telecel. The interconnection deal that matters most, the Econet one, wasn’t done yet.

We’ve just received the updated POTRAZ statics of Zimbabwe mobile subscribers. We are told the figures have just been updated this past week and represent the statistics for the second quarter of the year.