POTRAZ (the Post and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe), the national telecommunications regulator has just released its latest quarterly sector performance report, covering the third quarter of 2015. Though the report always comes one-quarter too late, it does give a comprehensive snapshot of local telecoms and technology rollout.
Over the review period Zimbabwe’s mobile penetration rate increased by 1.3% too reach 92.8%. This figure represents the active mobile subscribers, whose total came to 12,394,383 subscribers versus the total registered subscribers (both active and inactive) which number 19,054 million.
Econet still maintained its position as the largets subscriber with 6,679 million active subscribers, followed by NetOne with 3,8 million active subscirbers and Telecel holsing on to 1,913 million subscribers.
ZImbabwe’s internet penetration increasedby 2.1% during the third quarter and stood at 46.6%. The largest increase in internet connections during the period was registered for Fibre and LTE which rose by 53.4% and 5424.3% respectively. LTE connections stood at 26,185 with this huge jump attributed to the extensive LTE rollout from NetOne and Econet.
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Out of the 6,086,827 internet connections during the review period, 5,889,267 were for GPRS, EDGE,2G, 3G and HSDP. This indicates how mobile internet is till the leading form of broadband used by Zimbababweans.
International internet bandwidth capacity increased by 2.6% to reach 31,310Mbps from 30,520Mbps recorded in the previous quarter.
The total value of deposits on mobile money platforms declined by 10.5% and stood at $458 million, down from the previous quarter’s $512 million. this variation is likely areflection fo constraints in the economy.
Despite increases in national voice traffic(courtesy of on net voice promotions), revenue for mobile oprators declined by 2.9% during the review period, from $188,546,864 to $183,164,014. 60.1% of mobile telecoms revenue still comes from voice services, with data services contributing 19.5%
- Technology Zimbabwe