We’ve covered the Econet SmartBiz drama quite a bit now, but the story keeps growing. Zimbabweans are now signing Change.org petitions to express how angry they are. Two separate petitions are doing the rounds:
- One titled “Econet Wireless: Restore SmartBiz Fair Usage Policy – Reverse Deceptive Data Reduction” has 2,370 signatures in 5 days.
- Another, “Tell Econet & POTRAZ: Stop Unfair Data Caps and Give Zimbabweans the Right to Choose!” has 327 in 6 days.
That’s nearly 2,700 people signing public petitions against a mobile network operator in Zimbabwe. That doesn’t happen often. Especially considering these petitions are less than a week old.
Now, let’s be clear, Zimbabweans complain about network providers all the time. But it’s usually on Twitter or in WhatsApp groups. Going to Change.org and putting your name on a petition is a level above that. It means people feel they’ve been wronged, and that maybe a public protest can help.
So, how big is this really?
We understand that SmartBiz has about 100,000 subscribers. That means the bigger petition, the one with 2,370 signatures, represents about 2.4% of the SmartBiz base.
That’s unusually high. Most online petitions never get more than 1% of the affected user base. And this is a paid product. It’s not just a bunch of people annoyed on principle. These are customers, many of them businesses, who feel let down.
Put simply: when nearly 1 in every 40 users is signing a petition, that’s not the usual social media noise. That’s a signal.
Why the outrage?
Econet quietly changed how the SmartBiz bundle works. Users started experiencing heavy speed throttling and data caps they didn’t know existed. Econet says this is part of its Fair Usage Policy (FUP), which is common globally. True. But the problem is how it was handled.
Users say they weren’t told when the policy changed. They expected “unlimited” usage, or at least decent high-speed cutoffs. Instead, they found their service becoming almost unusable mid-month, and in some cases, even after just a few days.
This affected a small number of users who maxed out their usage, to the detriment of everyone else like we explained here.
However, the bigger issue may be trust. It feels to users like Econet moved the goalposts after the game had started.
And now POTRAZ is being dragged in too
The smaller petition is addressed not just to Econet, but also to POTRAZ, the telecoms regulator. Petitioners are arguing that regulators should step in to ensure fair marketing and clear service terms. If a package is going to have limits, those limits should be made obvious before purchase.
Whether POTRAZ responds is another matter. But the fact that they’re being called upon shows that people aren’t just mad at Econet, they believe the system isn’t protecting them either.
An infrastructure issue
We understand SmartBiz was oversubscribed. Econet couldn’t support all the new users on its existing infrastructure. They didn’t limit the number of subscribers to what their network could handle, and the result was congestion. Speeds dropped, and now here we are.
It’s the same story we saw with Starlink earlier this year. They too had to stop taking new residential users in Zimbabwe because their capacity was maxed out.
So now we’ve had both Econet and Starlink, two very different networks, run into the same problem. Demand is clearly there. What’s missing is infrastructure.
Where do we go from here?
The petitions probably won’t lead to direct action, Econet is not likely to reverse its FUP because of 2,370 signatures. But they matter a few reasons:
They show Econet’s most valuable customers are angry enough to protest in public.
They signal to POTRAZ that users are starting to expect more than silence from the regulator.
It also tells us something about Zimbabwe’s internet landscape: demand is growing faster than the networks can keep up. And unless someone, Econet, Starlink, POTRAZ, or government steps in to boost capacity, we’ll be seeing more of this.
Leave a Reply