For many Zimbabwean organisations, getting a reliable ISP is actually a battle. From prohibitive pricing to unreliable uptimes there are many uphill battles to overcome when it comes to selecting an internet service provider. Many have suggested that the solution to this is more competition and ContiTouch is one of the competitors to the established ISPs.
Contitouch has been around since 2018 now, but they have kept a pretty low profile because of the clients they serve. If you use public WiFi you might have come across Poshto WiFi Zones – Contitouch is the company behind those.
Since it’s inception, they have predominantly targeted businesses – offering unshared internet packages which are out of the reach of many household consumers.
At the moment our internet packages are primarily targeted at business’ as that is where our market advantages lie. Our internet set up is designed to serve business’ best with our unshared internet packages with no fair usage policy, dedicated networking team and a consistently stable connection with low latency
Contitouch
Unshared internet??
To the uninitiated, unshared internet (aka dedicate) establishes a private connection between an ISP (in this case, ContiTouch) and the clients premises. For businesses using Contitouch, this means the bandwidth purchased is exclusively for them. With no other users sharing the connections, the advertised speed is (usually) the speed end consumers get.
Uptime guarantees
The ISP I use has connectivity issues frequently and this is primarily because they have scheduled maintenances often. So when I was going through Contitouch’s documentation and saw the claim of 99.5% uptime I was interested in hearing how they are achieving that. Contitouch says they have partnerships with more than a single Internet Access Provider and this allows them to reroute traffic whenever an IAP is having issues.
Our internet links have ring setups so if one route has an issue we route it in a different direction ensuring as high an uptime as possible. At our data centre, we also have full redundancy and multiple forms of power backups to ensure uptime of above 99.5%. We also have a dedicated network team constantly on the lookout for issues and solving them before they become noticeable.
Packages on offer
At the time of writing, Contitouch’s website has 3 packages listed;
Beyond these packages though, businesses can get a quote for packages that suit their needs and Contitouch explained that one of their biggest clients actually has a 200 Mbps connection. These packages are primarily based on fibre connection but in “rare cases” Contitouch also relies on LTE.
If the pricing appears expensive, that is one of the downsides attached to dedicated internet access. For the superior price, you’ll pay a premium which is why it’s marketed primarily at businesses – those are the ones that can afford and actually make use of the advertised features.
Plans to cater for households?
Naturally, a question many would ask is whether Contitouch has plans to cater to residential consumers by offering shared internet like ZOL or TelOne does and they are answer was simple. “At the moment there are no plans to provide shared packages”.
Whilst this came as a bummer to myself and many others reading this praying for competition to ZOL and TelOne – Contitouch is not the saviour to our residential internet woes. For businesses, however, there are certainly more options. With Dark Fibre Africa’s impending entry into the market, it’s an interesting time to be a consumer of internet services in Zim…
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