NewsDay reports today that an Altfin Holdings subsidiary, Altfin Medical Aid Scheme, and state owned mobile operator, NetOne, have launched a new mobile phone based medical aid scheme. The scheme is called MedAccess. NetOne is the technical partner in the project. Subscribers will be able to register for the new service using their NetOne mobile…
Dollar for three are the buzzwords for Telecel customers, which refers to Telecel’s popular mega-juice airtime top-up card which costs $1 but offers $3 worth of value, i.e. $1 allowing off-net calls, $1 bonus for on-net calls and a $1 data bundle worth 10MB. Tariff wise, Telecel offers a $0.23 rate across all networks. Compare…
If you’re in Zimbabwe and checked the newspapers yesterday, you probably saw the Brodacom advert above. The advert claims that before Brodacom came along, setting up fixed broadband in Zimbabwe used to cost US $3,500 and that thanks to Brodacom, that figure has been brought down to US $99.50, the price of Brodacom’s Wi-Fi device…
When Africom unveiled its mobile broadband service pricing last year in October it was to the delight of a market frustrated by exorbitantly priced internet (in the case of Econet) or just internet that didn’t work much (hello PowerTel). We commented then that on price Africom’s service was “by far a preferable alternative”. We still…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
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 […]
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…
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:
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…