A report by Rwandan newspaper today, says Liquid Telecom, has acquired additional telecommunications assets from a former Rwandan mobile & internet operator under liquidation called Rwandatel.

A somewhat confusing report today in the government owned Sunday Mail says TelOne requires a total $76 million for fibre optic roll out. The article breaks down the $76 million into;

Three days ago Liquid Telecom announced the acquisition of telecom assets in Eastern Africa belonging to Altech. According to Liquid, the additional terrestrial infrastructure resulting from the acquisition makes the company the owner of Africa’s largest single fibre network, which is quite significant for the Nic Rudnick led company.

I remember the early days of email when I had a Yahoo and Hotmail account with a 5MB mailbox which I thought was totally great even though I was constantly deleting emails and when Gmail threw 1GB on the table that was the end of my Yahoo and Hotmail experience. I had the same sensation [...]

A fibre cable cut in Maputo, Mozambique that occurred on Wednesday 9 May has adversely affected TelOne’s internet services. The problem affected at least all TelOne ADSL users in Zimbabwe whose internet significantly slowed down, with some users not able to access the service at all. According to our sources at Zimbabwe’s sole fixed telecoms operator, after the cut, all its internet traffic got rerouted through existing satellite links, which are much slower than fibre and have limited capacity.

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.

We saw the map below in Econet’s financial results briefings for 2011 and thought to post it here. It shows the progress of the fibre backbone project that the largest mobile operators is working. As you can see, the section running from Harare through Bulawayo to Beitbridge is now fully operational. It also shows the fibre rings in Harare and Bulawayo have been completed.

PowerTel and Econet, Zimbabwe’s main suppliers of international internet bandwidth both experienced some downtime on their fibre cables yesterday.

We were at Aquiva Wireless in Harare the other day, talking to the founding team about developments at the Internet Access Provider. There are some interesting developments alright; it’s Mobile WiMax offerings, fibre, VSAT and some VoIP services to launch in a few months.

Many of you saw the Masawara press release on Tuesday, and like us, most of you went into looking for who Telerix is. This is because Telerix is not on the list of official POTRAZ licensed Internet Access Providers. We thought it’d be a typical walk in the park verifying this information with the concerned parties. We were wrong.

This week, the Herald carried an interesting article on the national fibre backbone project. Carefully titled “Laying of fibre optic cable progresses well” the article disclosed that TelOne, the country’s only fixed telecom operator is digging a fibre cable trench to Mutare.