The Internet At Work Sucks, But The Alternatives Aren’t Any Better

Published: 27 Mar 2023 at 21:37 +0200 Updated: 16 Apr 2023 at 20:15 +0200

Updates

16 Apr 2023 at 00:00 UTC— TelOne eventually got sensible pricing, but we’re gonna give Telco a shot since the revised Liquid Home quote was still expensive. We paid two weeks ago but they haven’t come yet so they have to give us pro rated service. I probably need to look into why the office internet is so bad as well.
01 Aug 2023 at 00:00 UTC— We finally got Telco and we’ve used it for the past few months and while it’s faster, it’s still terrible among 10 users. I guess I’ve gotta start doing QoS management.
16 Apr 2024 at 16:18 +0200—
Funny how I’m adding a post literally a year after I wrote it since I need to reference it elsewhere.
The situation isn’t much better especially as Starlink was forced to deactivate terminals in Zimbabwe. I doubt the telcos have any room to expand since they’re riddled with debt so unless a new operator comes or Zimbabwe’s macroeconomic situation changes, nothing will improve. Econet’s 5G bundles seem promising but it needs a $500 “5G router” (that’s currently out of stock everywhere) and they don’t offer it officially yet which is why I linked to a blog post talking about it.
As for Telco, it sucks but what can I do? Actually learn networking, I suppose.

I work around Avenues in Harare and the internet is awful. We use TelOne ADSL that gives a paltry 5Mbps between 10 people costing us $90/month for unlimited. We got away with $40/month before but TelOne decided to raise their prices so here we are. Sadly, as bad as TelOne is, the alternatives aren’t much better.

TelOne’s LTE doesn’t cover the office and the only fiber they offer costs $200/Mbps.
Econet, which we spend $300/month on, asks for $80 for just 50GB. But it is very fast.
ZOL’s LTE is congested and they want ~~$2,000~~$1,000 to lay the fiber cable. After that it’s ~~$420~~$216/month as their quoted exchange rate is probably illegal.
Utande’s LTE doesn’t reach us. Props to the guy for trying to smoothen the blow of the $3K installation cost, but it turned out that it would actually cost double and that it wasn’t possible since it goes over a road. Shame really since their monthly service was reasonable at $150 a month.
PowerTel has a modest installation fee of $300 but they require $600 a month for service.
Telco seemed promising with an installation cost of $200/month. Thing is, they’re speeds are nonsensical. What use is 1Mbps at peak time? They’re better plans would cost $270/month. I would go with this, but it’s hard to get this company to spend money on things that would help and they don’t want to lose the aforementioned Econet bundles.

Honestly I Give Up

I doubt things in Zim will ever get cheaper. Infrastructure is poor and there’s no money to upgrade it so they all have to pay up just to keep the lights on. The government also needs money to operate and given a low tax base, it needs to scalp wherever it can. Even so, Zimbabwe is underpopulated and you have places where there are few wealthy people who live spread out and many poor people who cluster together. The solution would be to densify cities, but the few rich people don’t want that and I doubt city councils even care to address this even if it would fix so many service delivery problems.

Apparently Starlink is approved in Zimbabwe so that might be better, but it’ll probably be far more expensive once it gets in Zim.

Hold Up

I shared my findings at work and the founder suggested I talk to someone in their network. They got a revised quote for ZOL which was half of what I got since it turned out the connection point was closer. The person is looking at other quotes and will get back to me. Still, I’m not optimistic about things.