ZOL reduces the price of its WiMax package

Here’s a bit of good news for people who have been using ZOL Zimbabwe’s entry level WiMAX service; ZOL has lowered the price from $59 to $49 starting with subscriptions for the month of May 2015.

No other adjustments have been made to the rest of the ZOL product lineup and the package wasn’t tweaked in terms of maximum possible download speeds. It’s still an offer for unlimited internet (the cheapest offer for unlimited internet in Zimbabwe actually), albeit at a cheaper price.

This $10 price reduction doesn’t make it the cheapest service from ZOL Zimbabwe though. There’s still the $39 ZOL Fibroniks Basic Essentials that has become the poster package for the ZOL Fibroniks suite.

It’s hard to point out exactly why ZOL is making this adjustment to one package, but the challenges of a competitive Internet Service market don’t seem like the issue here. That would have been the case if the prices for all the internet packages were being tinkered with. it’s probably got more to do with a strategy to make ZOL Fibroniks converts out of all these entry level WiMAX users.

These users fit the profile of the Fibre to the Home User. They’ve already sworn allegiance to the ZOL brand (they know what the internet is and probably what the word Fibroniks means), they can afford over $450 in annual internet service subscriptions (disposable income), and are typically handicapped by the occasional frustrating “up to 1Mbps” speed that WiMAX offers, even on a great day.

With a 2015 target of 100,000 homes on ZOL Fibroniks by the end of the year, it makes a lot of sense to shore up potential sign ups especially from existing customers.

I wouldn’t know if a capped $39 fibre package would be alluring enough for a user to crossover from an unlimited $49 offer, but that’s what ZOL will figure that out with this change. Perhaps if more adjustments are made to the Fibroniks package, (hopefully because of competing forces from TelOne’s own fibre package) people just might consider this $10 difference as minimal and “ZOL On” to the fibre train.