This guest post was authored by Tapiwa Mapani. He’s not a trained geek and says “I just have a restless mind that makes me experiment with this type of stuff and most of the time to great success.” He has a wireless network setup at his home office which uses a mobile broadband USB dongle…
Starting last week, NetOne has been making statements in the press notifying Zellco NetOne subscribers that the relationship with Zellco, its service provider, has been severed. As a NetOne service provider, Zellco signed up new post-paid customers and collected revenue on behalf of NetOne for a fee.
According to a market research report released today by global research firm, Frost & Sullivan, Zimbabwe’s mobile communications revenue will reach US $ 1.3 billion by 2016, with 20.1% compound annual growth rate. The report comes after Econet, Zimbabwe’s largest telecoms firm, released its year end financials showing solid growth and annual revenue of half…
It’s official, the Telecel free mobile broadband test is over. Today, Telecel advised mobile broadband users through SMS that the test period has been finalized and starting Monday 1 May (2011), all internet usage will be charged at US 10 cents per megabyte. Here’s the text of the SMS:
Today, we spent the better part of the morning at the Spiritage network operation center in Harare. We were invited along with a dozen other writers from the various media houses in Zimbabwe to a “pre-launch media briefing” of the business group. First, let me say of all the Zim internet access providers (IAPs) we’ve…
Uniswitch, a Twenty Third Century Systems Group (TTCS) subsidiary, is working on a VAS platform to be launched in the coming months. According to Uniswitch Managing Director, Reginald Gumbo, this is part of Uniswitch’s long terms strategic direction of developing mobile commerce solutions for the market.
As you may know, the POTRAZ deadline for mobile phone subscribers to register sim cards expired (for the third and final time) at the end of March. Some subscribers have already reported disconnections and some, despite being given a whole year to register, are not amused at all. Most are claiming they registered but still…
We just thought we would post here an ITU depiction of 3G connectivity world over from a report titled “The World in 2010, ICT facts and figures”. We were quite struck with how Zimbabwe compares to the majority of African countries.
News tips we’re getting are all suggesting strongly that Internet Access Providers (IAPs), Africom and Valley Technologies will be launching mobile phone networks soon. “Soon” here could ofcourse mean anything from a couple of weeks (at best) to a few months. We’re guessing, from what we know so far, the most would be 2 months.
We had an exclusive interview with ForgetMeNot Africa’s Chief Operating Officer, Jeremy George. We discussed the Message Optimiser (MO), the company’s flagship product. We also discussed its implementation on mobile networks in Africa and the SMS traffic the system processes. At the end of the interview, George give us his opinion on mobile solution trends…
The Harare-Mozambique TelOne backbone fibre is now live. The state owned fixed telecoms operator has announced that the cable now links the state owned fixed operator to the East African Submarine System (EASSy) undersea cable through Mozambique. TelOne has taken up initial capacity of 2.48 Gbps (16 x STM-1s) and according to the company the…
Seacom this week admitted that its submarine fibre cable that landed on the east Africa coast in July 2009, “has had challenges since inception”. The statement was made by Seacom’s head of business development, Aidan Baigriecable. The admission comes as Seacom considers buying backup undersea fibre capacity from other submarine fibre cable operators.
There’s a growing reappearance of value added services (VAS) on the local mobile networks. Entrepreneurs are seeing this and you can see the increasing number of adverts in the local press like the current itllusion mobiplay one which reads:
Telecel Zimbabwe has just revealed to Techzim that it’s working with Zimswitch Mobile to include more banks on its mobile banking platform. Telecel launched the Skwama mobile banking services in January this year but only provided the service to subscribers banking with Zimbabwe’s Kingdom Bank.
Google has announced through its Google Africa blog that it has launched Gmail SMS in Uganda, Tanzania and Malawi. In Uganda Google is working with MTN, Uganda Telecom and Orange, in Tanzania with Vodacom and in Malawi with Airtel and TNM. Gmail SMS has been around for some time in Africa. The service is currently…
The Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ) has revealed through Zimbabwe’s state owned daily, the Herald, that it granted TelOne a GSM mobile phone license late last year. TelOne is Zimbabwe’s only fixed line operator and is owned by the government. TelOne becomes the country’s fourth mobile operator. The other three are Econet,…
Last month, we attended the Econet Energy launch in Harare. At the event Econet gave out some solar powered ZTE-G S316 mobile phones to everyone attending. For us it was a convenient opportunity to review the solar powered mobile phones and provide our general opinion on them.
There’s been silence on what happens now that the registration deadline has expired. Emails to POTRAZ didn’t yield anything, and asking the mobile operators left us no closer to the answer. Only NetOne responded yesterday with “POTRAZ is yet to give us a clear position on what course of action to take now that we…