Denford Magora's Latest Zimbabwe News Blog

Nelson Chamisa, the MDC-T Minister of ICT, who is presiding over the complete and utter massacre of quality Internet services in Zimbabwe. The 100 days in which he promised to have upped quality and capacity by 60% are almost over and instead we have a 60% decline in the same! Harare, Zimbabwe, 06 August 2009 Glitches with Internet connection have prevented me from posting since last night. It really is a complete meltdown, for me at least. As you know I have several ways in which I try to connect online and get on with the job. But all three ways broke down at the same time starting last night. At the office, our so-called broadband connection turns out to be nothing of the sort. The ISP was very helpful, they came in today with a new ADSL modem to try and see if the problem was our modem, but it was not. In the end, with the new-fangled advanced modem, they managed to pinpoint the problem as emanating from TelOne, the State-owned phone company who supply our lease line for broadband....

So, you missed me, huh? I went AWOL because starting Friday, Internet connections in Zimbabwe went haywire. As is typical of customer service from our Inclusive Government, which believes people must just shut up and bear it, there was no communication whatsoever as to what had gone wrong. Today, I spoke with the government-owned company that is supposed to be in charge of these things. Here's what they said, verbatim: "Starting Friday afternoon, something went wrong with base stations and affected ISPs. Because we do not work at weekends, the fault was only found out today, and our people are trying to see what they can do" "When will we back on line?" I asked the nice lady who attended to me. "I don't know" "Can you ask someone who will know, I am willing to wait." 'No one knows. But it will be soon?" "Three weeks?" I asked. "No one knows. It affected everybody. It's not just you, lots of people have been pho...