Gigatel, the company we wrote about in September last year when it launched VoIP services, has launched a new V-SAT hub in Zimbabwe. The new hub is a Shiron product and operates on C-Band frequencies. It was supplied and engineered by Gilat Satcom, a global satellite communications provider. The announcement was made through a press…
At the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce symposium held last week, Twenty Third Century Systems(TTCS) Group Business Development Manager, Thandi Ngwenya presented on an interesting topic: Building a Pan African ICT Company. In the presentation Ngwenya says she shares some “5 key lessons that we have learnt in our journey to establish TTCS as a…
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…
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.
The EASSy cable, in which local state owned fixed operator TelOne has a stake through WIOCC, has had its design capacity upgraded to 4.72 Tbps. According to the West Indian Ocean Cable Company, the upgrade makes EASSy by far the highest capacity submarine cable on the east African coast. The recent capacity upgrade follows another…
Barely seconds after we posted the accusation by Telecel that NetOne won’t share infrastructure, a email from Telecel appeared in our inbox with a press release titled “Telecel MD gives evidence to parliamentary committee” attached. Telecel has been mainly silent on the issued leveled against them in the past few months but the appearance before…
Telecel, the second largest mobile operator in Zimbabwe by subscriber base, has accused state owned (and smallest) mobile operator, NetOne, of refusing to share tower infrastructure. Telecel Zimbabwe CEO, Mr. Aimable Mpore made the accusation in a response to questions about Telecel’s shareholding structure from the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Media, Information and Communication Technology.
In a release we just received, Telecel has announced that it is scrapping the extra cost of calling mobile numbers outside the Telecel network. Effectively, this means Telecel subscribes will now call NetOne and Econet numbers at the same rate they call Telecel numbers.
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.
State owned backhaul Internet Access Provider, PowerTel has launched 3G CDMA mobile broadband in Zimbabwe’s second largest city, Bulawayo. The official launch took place at the close of 2010 and the mobile internet service is now fully operational.
2010 brought so much positive change to Zimbabwe’s ICT landscape. An exciting year indeed. But it’s behind us now and 2011 has just started. It remains to be seen if growth in the sector this year will happen at the same 2010 leaps-and-bounds rate. Still the new year looks promising from a couple of fronts.…
Some weeks ago, a fellow blogger sent us a blog post suggestion in the form of a list of questions about Zimbabwe’s mobile and internet connectivity.Here is the list of questions and answers. Your Zim connectivity FAQ. We added a few of our own. While this is targeted at Zimbabweans in the Diaspora, it includes…
In a response to an email we sent them, Telco (Telecontract) revealed that they’re working on a mobile broadband service to be launched in 2011. Telco says “deployment of the first base stations is underway and commissioning of the commercial services is scheduled for early in 2011.”
Following Tuesday’s post about TelOne’s connection to the Mozambican fibre cable, there have been some questions about a statement in the story that Africom has already connected to the TDM fibre cable in Mozambique.
Econet just announced some 3 milestones today. The first and most significant is that Econet has established a direct connection to the SEACOM undersea optic fibre cable in Durban and is ready to connect customers once given the green light by the regulatory authorities.
We share below the IT excerpt of Zimbabwe’s 2011 National Budget Statement presented on 25 November 2010 by Zim Finance Minister Tendai Biti.
Like most of you in Zimbabwe, we’ve seen the adverts and the articles in the print press about Telco’s launch of the first public VoIP network. We wanted to find out more, for you our dear readers so we contacted Telco and got some details.
As promised last week at the launch of the new red Africom, Africom has launched their mobile broadband service this week. The mobile broadband service is available in Harare only at the moment
The EASSy undersea fibre cable will go live tomorrow, 16 July 2010. The EASSy commercial launch follows the completion of three successful tests that have been carried out on the cable in the last few months.
According to an update on the SEACOM official blog, its broken undersea fibre cable between Mumbai and Mombasa will take until the July 22 to fix. The cable went down on 5 July and affected all SEACOM internet Traffic to India and Europe.