It is noble that the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT) is drafting a national ICT policy document. But what will this policy achieve? Government policy documents run the […]
We just received a news release from Telecel on the subscriber stats matter from yesterday’s article. Well, Monday’s actually. The mobile operator is clearly bent on setting the record straight. […]
I remember when I first heard about BlackBerry around 2005. It was through the prestigious “sent from my BlackBerry” signature at the bottom of an email response I got from a contact in the UK. It was a short response to my rather long email; something to just let me know he had seen the…
TelOne Acting MD, Lawrence Nkala, revealed in an article posted by the Sunday News this week that TelOne has expanded ADSL services to more cities and towns successfully. The new locations that now have ADSL internet are Mutare, Marondera and Gweru. This is addition to Harare and Bulawayo, the capital city and second largest respectively,…
As you may already know, Econet announced its full year audited financials yesterday. We posted a bit about it yesterday but there wasn’t much besides the impressive profit figures the telecoms firm continues to post. Today we have more details; information on the company’s plans this year, their operation challenges, what they are doing to…
With less than two days left before the close of the year, we thought we’d post a listing of all the top stories we covered this year. This has been our busiest year since.
Internet Access Provider, Telecontract (Telco), has interconnected its VoIP network with the Econet Wireless’s GSM mobile phone network. We got the announcement yesterday from Telco. The IAP launched VoIP services in November 2010 and more than a year later, had still not interconnected with a single mobile operator.
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…
Reports coming out of South Africa yesterday suggest the country’s government is apprehensive about BlackBerry services. The South African government is proposing allowing the police access to the BlackBerry encrypted messenger service supposedly in a bid to help catch criminals.
Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL), an Indian state owned telecoms firm, is reportedly considering acquiring a stake in TelOne. An Indian publication, The Economic Times revealed today that MTNL is eying a 51% stake in Zimbabwe’s sole fixed line operator.
Econet had an AGM on Friday which brought out very interesting information, Newsday has a story on this. For starters NetOne and TelOne reportedly owe a collective $70million; the said debt has been outstanding for a while now such that Econet has approached government to assist with recovering it. TelOne is acknowledged as admitting its…
After last week’s announcement of Utande’s connection to the SEACOM undersea cable along Zimbabwe’s border with Mozambique, we visited the company for more information. Prior to this, efforts to get even the slightest of a whisper from Utande were mostly unsuccessful, apparently due to acquisition negotiations with now majority shareholder, Masawara plc. We were thus…
We’ve just received the updated POTRAZ statics of Zimbabwe mobile subscribers. We are told the figures have just been updated this past week and represent the statistics for the second quarter of the year.
Going over reports from the ICT global conference held in Harare last week, we came across something that made us stop. It’s a report published by “The Zimbabwean” that basically says Broadlands Networks is preparing to launch a 5G network. Here’s an extract from the report:
At the “Thinking Global” ICT conference held in Harare two days ago, Econet disclosed the number of subscribers using mobile broadband internet services on its network. That number is a staggering 1.8 million. Staggering because that’s more than 30% of the total Econet subscribers (5,500,000).
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…
Econet has just released its financial results for the full year to February 2011. It’s another mega profits year for Zimbabwe’s largest telecoms firm; profits after tax for the period stand at US$140.9 million this year, up 24% from last year’s results.
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…
Over the past few months, information in the ICT sector has been suggesting Zimbabwean mobile operators are working to get RIM’s BlackBerry services on the local networks. Reports like this one on Telecel we did in December last year. It’s not clear how much progress Telecel has made seeing the engineer said to be working…
We were at Aquiva Wireless in Harare the other day, talking to the founding team about developments at the Internet Access Provider. There are some interesting developments alright; it’s Mobile WiMax offerings, fibre, VSAT and some VoIP services to launch in a few months.