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A vote of confidence for Telecel
Orascom Telecom have ceased their fence sitting ways with Telecel Zimbabwe in a big way. The Independent reported on Friday that the company will pump in $70 million into Telecel Zimbabwe. This move is very significant for the company beyond monetary value as Vimpelcom (Orascom’s parent) has made a commitment to channel its global resources…
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Review: Brodacom mobile broadband internet
About two weeks ago, we received three mobile broadband (and one of them primarily a voice device as well) from the Spiritage Group company called Brodacom. We got the opportunity to test the three devices over about 6 days, which gave us a more or less clear picture of the performance. We tested the devices…
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Comparison: Zimbabwe’s mobile banking services transacting fees
In Zimbabwe, those in tech (and banking) will remember 2011 as the year of mobile banking. Not in the sense of the use of mobile banking services by Zimbabweans, but more that it’s the year almost every financial institution and all mobile operators launched.
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Local website hosting and buying Zimbabwe
The guys over at Candid Consumerism posted last week that the Buy Zimbabwe people were being hypocritical telling everyone to buy Zimbabwean products yet Buy Zimbabwe itself is not. Buy Zimbabwe won’t eat its own dog food. Its website is hosted in the United States. If they were being sincere, the article says, they’d just…
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POSB launches ZimSwitch Mobile powered mobile banking service
Back in march when news first broke that ZimSwitch was working with Telecel to power mobile banking for local banks, the two banks that Telecel confirmed they were working with were CABS and POSB. CABS launched its mobile banking service (branded textacash) in September. As for POSB, ZimSwitch told us exactly month ago the bank…
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Harare City Council suspends fibre optic trenching
Like us, you probably woke up to the news that Tendai Mahachi (Harare’s Town Clerk) announced that the City Council has suspended all fibre optic trenching activities in the city. The reason for this was attributed to a breach of agreement on the part of some telecommunications operators and their contractors.
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More information on Liquid Telecom’s Zambia project
Econet Wireless Zimbabwe just sent out a press release on the Liquid fibre project announced last week by Liquid telecoms. Here’s a summary of new information in the release:
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CEC Liquid Telecom builds largest fibre network in Zambia
Yesterday, Liquid telecom announced that it has completed phase one of a fibre network it’s building in Zambia in a joint venture with the Copperbelt Energy Corporation (CEC). The completed fibre so far stretches from the Zambian capital city of Lusaka to the Copperbelt.
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So, just how many Zimbabweans have mobile phones?
The latest mobile subscriber stats from POTRAZ show that Zimbabwe now has a mobile penetration of about 64%. Really impressive if you consider that in 2009, the mobile penetration was just 24%. But every time that mobile penetration percentage is mentioned, there’s almost always need to clarify that the percentage may actually be misleading.
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Spiritage’s 4G Brodacom launch, a game changer?
Yesterday, Spiritage finally came out with huge adverts in the press claiming they have a modern 4G network. The “game’s just changed” shouts the advert! Has it?
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12 banks implementing ZimSwitch Mobile. Platform to be mobile network neutral
We met ZimSwitch business development manager Adam Roscoe this week to discuss the newly unveiled ZimSwitch Mobile platform. Roscoe disclosed in the interview that a total of 12 financial institutions […]
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I’m investing in Zim Agriculture, says African award winning telecoms exec
Last week, we received a press release on the winning of a Global Telecoms Business award by Norman Moyo, an exec at Tanzanian mobile operator called Zantel. We posted the story here. Moyo has worked for Celtel in Zambian and Nigeria, Econet Wireless in Zimbabwe and Zain in Bahrain. He was recognised as one of…
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Zimbabwe’s current mobile subscriber stats (September 2011)
We recently enquired from the Post and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ) the 3rd quarter mobile subscriber statistics for Zimbabwe. The figures we are as follows:
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Day 4 of BlackBerry issues. We’re letting you down, says RIM executive
It is day 4 and the BlackBerry issues are not over for some customers. In fact, as the day ended yesterday, reports started coming out that the outage was spreading to the US. For its part, Research in Motion explained at a press conference that the actual initial problems had been fixed, but a message…
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Africa’s Telecoms Titans: Etisalat
Etisalat is a global telecommunications company that was founded in 1976 as a parastatal owned by British investors and the federal government of the United Arab Emirates. The company has grown to become one of the biggest full service telecommunications operators in the world with a footprint across MENA (Middle East & North Africa, West…
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NetOne to provide lowest priced mobile broadband. Test period ends.
NetOne, the only mobile operator locally that has not been providing mobile broadband services commercially, is now ready to launch. We have received tips from NetOne subscribers that starting Saturday, 8 October, the operator started sending an SMS message notifying subscriber the test was over and they had to start paying for the mobile broadband.
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Young Zimbabwean telecoms executive receives global award
Current Zantel Chief Commercial Officer Norman Moyo, has received a Global Telecoms Business (GTB) Forty under Forty award. The awards recognise the telecoms industry’s young leaders of today and the leaders of tomorrow. The young leaders are selected from those nominated by worldwide readers of the Global Telecoms Business magazine, a renowned telecoms focused magazine.
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Dark week for BlackBerry Internet Services. RIM explains outage.
It’s been a bad week for Research in Motion. And the issues are not even over yet. The company’s BlackBerry platform experienced an outage on Monday that disrupted the service for users in users in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and India. Yesterday, when everyone expected the outage to be fixed, it spread to Latin…
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eTXT service gets ForgetMeNot Africa an AfricaCom award nomination
ForgetMeNot Africa, the developers of the technology powering Econet’s eTXT service, have been nominated for an AfricaCom award in the Best New Service category. The FMNA’s technology is called Message Optimiser and has been deployed by a total of 6 operators across Africa. Message Optimiser also powers the Dasuba service also available locally and across…
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Press Release: Telecel and ZimSwitch team up to provide mobile banking
Telecel and ZimSwitch today (Thursday) announced that they had teamed up to enable banks to offer their customers an affordable and easy-to-use mobile banking facility that could change the face of banking in Zimbabwe.
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Day 1 of Zimbabwe ICT Africa 2011 (Pictures)
We’re just from the first day of ICT Africa 2011. The first day is dedicated to business and invited guests, though really no one is prevented from attending. We spent most of the day going around the stands and speaking to people about the stuff their tech companies are doing.
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One year later, Africom still sells a Gig for $18
One of the main highlights of last year’s ICT Africa was the launch of Africom mobile broadband services. The service launched with a one month free bandwidth offer. Before Africom’s product came along, mobile broadband in Zimbabwe was only offered by Econet, PowerTel and TelOne. None of the three incumbents offered reliable connectivity so the…
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Our ICT Africa 2011 wish list
Later this week, this year’s ICT Africa exhibition and conference will take place. It’ll run from the 5th to the 7th of October. It’s Zimbabwe’s ICT industry flagship event, organized by the Computer Suppliers Association of Zimbabwe (COMSA). This year however (and last year as well actually) there’s great involvement by the Ministry of ICT…
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So how much does it cost to use EcoCash?
On Friday last week, Econet launched EcoCash, a mobile money service that so far looks like a game changer. On the local market at least. The concept is a tried and tested one. M-PESA has worked phenomenally well in Kenya, and Econet has read the M-PESA story cover to cover. In fact it is its…
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Mobile Moola, FBC’s ZimSwitch Ready mobile banking service launches
Last week, we posted that ZimSwitch was launching a mobile banking service called ZimSwitch Mobile and that it would start rolling out the service to banks before the end of September, with more banks following. Immediately after we posted that article, a reader sent us a tip that the service was already live at CABS.
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Itllusion’s mobitones VAS. Our brief take on it
Not too long ago, we had a meeting with Nzwisisa Chidembo of Itllusion to know more about his start-up. The start-up is a mobile Value Added Services provider that has divided its offering as follows:
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Why Zimbabwe doesn’t have Google Global Cache yet
When we spoke to the Zimbabwe Internet Service Providers Association (ZISPA) chairman Troy Prinsloo some several weeks ago for the domain registration article, he mentioned that last year Google approached ZISPA with a proposal to have a Google Global Cache (GGC) in Zimbabwe. ZISPA’s response to Google, he said, was ‘no thank you’.
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ZimSwitch to launch mobile banking platform this month
This week, we received communication from ZimSwitch that the ZimSwitch Mobile platform will be rolling out to the first wave of ‘ZimSwitch Ready’ banks this month and that more banks will follow “hot on their trails”.
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NetOne to use Zimpost branch network for OneWallet mobile money
In January, NetOne announced the launch of the OneWallet mobile money service to stakeholders. This was followed two months later with the announcement that Gemalto, an international digital security company, was deploying a mobile money transfer solution for the OneWallet service.