Tag Posts: Africom

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.

Zimbabwe is poised to benefit from a deal announced yesterday between SEACOM and Telecomunicacoes de Mocambique (TDM), Mozambique’s telecoms parastatal. The company has been granted the go ahead to connect our landlocked country to the undersea cable. This is expected to have a positive impact on corporate and individual consumers in the not too distant future.

Last week, we got an opportunity to visit the Africom head office in Harare. Africom staff showed us some of the gadgets that the telecoms operator is promoting as part of the roll out of the new voice and data services. The gadgets are available for sale at the Africom shops and the company says it is working to establish reseller partnership with independent retailers in the country. We took a few photos of the gadgets. Here are the pictures:

When we posted the article about Africom’s very low voice tariffs last week, one of the readers commenting on the article expressed doubt that the Africom network has interconnection with the other voice networks (Econet, Telecel, NetOne and TelOne) to allow subscribers to make off-net calls. This week, we visited Africom and sadly found out this actually is the case. Well, partly.

As you probably know already, Africom started an ad campagin for the launch of mobile telephony and some new data services last week. The full message of the availability of mobile telephony and the additional data services was made earlier this week. This morning, Africom sent us the tariffs for the new services.

Africom, one of Zimbabwe’s largest Internet Access Providers, has started what appears to be an advertising campaign for the launch of some new services. In the print press today, a tech company, which definitely is Africom (we’ve confirmed) has a teaser advert for some data and voice services.

If you either hated history or fell asleep halfway through the lesson; Gondwanaland was a great big continental block that contained what we refer to as Africa, India, Australia, and other sub-continents. Its existence is based on theoretical assumptions related to the earth’s evolution.

As Telecel announced the opening of its mobile broadband test to all subscribers yesterday, Econet posted colorful adverts in the newspapers declaring “Up to 50% off on broadband tariffs. Now you can enjoy more broadband for less.”

Subscribers have played a major role in the establishment of mobile voice and data service in the last decade, through the experiments of all the existing mobile operators, subscribers have been made to pay for services that most of the time did not offer them good service. Subscribers involuntarily became guinea pigs for the mobile operators. New services continue to be launched where the subscriber takes both the position of a guinea pig and a client bringing money into the business.

We use Mweb (now iWayAfrica) for our primary internet connection at the office. I have 3 mobile broadband dongles from Africom, Telecel and Econet, which I use in order of the most affordable and usable at any given time. Now the problem with Econet sites is that, unless I’m using the Econet dongle, I cannot open them.

News tips we’re getting are all suggesting strongly that Internet Access Providers (IAPs), Africom and Valley Technologies will be launching mobile phone networks soon. “Soon” here could ofcourse mean anything from a couple of weeks (at best) to a few months. We’re guessing, from what we know so far, the most would be 2 months.