Millions of mobile phone subscribers and businesses were left stranded as power cuts in Zimbabwe had their biggest mass effect at the weekend.
Econet Wireless – with a subscriber base of at least 10 million people and with control of 90% of mobile money transfers – failed to power its generators on Saturday during 14 hours of load-shedding.
“Our network operations centre failed to kick off following a Zesa power outage,” reads a statement from Econet.
People could not transact through the Ecocash mobile money platform until around midnight when electricity was restored countrywide. Data services on Econet and voice calls were also unavailable.
Industry sources said since last week mobile operators had been contemplating introducing “downtime” for their base stations for at least eight hours per day. The reason is that they cannot afford to run base stations countrywide using diesel-powered generators when fuel is scarce and relatively expensive.
There are 8,976 base stations in Zimbabwe. Econet owns more than 56% of them. The remainder are owned by TelOne and Telecel.
Zimbabwe, facing its biggest power-generation crisis in history, has come up with stop-gap measures to raise money to import power.
Last week government resolved that hotels and other tourism-related entities in the resort town of Victoria Falls should pay for electricity in foreign currency. They will join mines that have been paying in US dollars since last year.
