Tigo Campaign

Mobile operators in Tanzania are at great war, price wars that is. When Tigo lowered its call costs to Tsh. 1 per second (1USD = Tshs. 1350), all the other networks branded it as the inferior network. Tigo is considered the village boy by the other players, its the only mobile network in Tanzania that has not bothered to sell expensive data plans, not bothered to improve its data platform (still on GPRS) and not even bothered to offer any corporate services to its subscribers and instead concentrated on the small consumer who is the majority. This concept has worked for them greatly, they have turned out as one of the biggest networks in Tanzania by subscriber base.

Zantel, a CDMA/GSM network which is leading in EVDO data services in Dar es salaam was second to introduce the 1 shilling per second calls and a 3.45 shillings across other networks. With a very small subscriber base compared to the other networks, this was not very notable even with really colorful branding, very well done campaigns featuring popular artists including Lady Jaydee (Leading Musician) and Nancy Sumari (Former Miss Tanzania & Miss World Africa) among others.

Early this month, Vodacom followed and introduced 1 shilling per second for Vodacom to Vodacom calls and went down to serious campaigns featuring AY, a popular Tanzanian hip hop artist. The most surprising thing is that in a week of this launch, Tigo hit back with a half a shilling campaign titled “Tigo Thumni” with calls from Tigo to Tigo costing only half a Tanzanian shilling, meaning a call is 30 shillings a minute, which is literally the cheapest call rate in East Africa coming to about 1.65 Kenya shillings a minute.

Zain which for long stuck to its “corporate” outfit, today decided to unveil its 1 shilling per second campaign, not an offer but a rate reduction on Zain to Zain calls. So literally speaking, Tanzania is officially the country with the cheapest calling rates in East Africa if not Africa generally.

Data rates are also reasonable compared to Kenyan rates with Zantel’s EVDO service being the fastest in Dar es salaam and only going for Tshs. 10,000 for 200MB and Tshs. 70,000 for 2GB, way cheaper compared to Safaricom’s 3G which is the only service that comes closest in Kenya to what Zantel is offering.

Tigo is also rumored to be launching a mobile money transfer service in Tanzania to try seal the wholes which have seen Vodacom’s M-Pesa and Zain’s Zap fail to hit the market as expected and reflected by the growth in Kenya.

While the call rates may be cheapest in Tanzania, customer care is worst in Africa here in my opinion, a shame because Tanzanians are among the most hospitable people I know.

Rahasms.com offering free sms to East Africa

A new website offering free SMS within East Africa went live yesterday, or so I seem to think. Rahasms.com to me seems to work like previously running sms websites which somehow shut down at some point. You register, activate account, activate number and there you are, 5 SMS messages to any mobile network in East Africa for free. I tried it and sent one to myself, you get 100 characters for your message and the rest of the message is an advert, clearly the business point of it.

While we get these innovative products, one cant stop to wonder, what happens to the consistency of such services?  There was Sasanet, SMS-East Africa, Niaje, someone answer me, where did they all go?

I guess the best thing we can do is enjoy this while it lasts….hope it does!