It may well be that TelOne is now ready to bring it’s Blaze LTE service out of testing. According to TelOne, the new prices became effective yesterday (the 18th of February 2020). The new prices are as follows:


Package	Data Value	Old RTGS$ Price Price	New RTGS$ Price
Blaze lite	8GB	$54	$108
Blaze extra	15GB	$82	$145
Blaze Boost	20GB	$102	$179
Blaze Ultra	40GB	$165	$289
Blaze TrailBlazer	100GB	$248	$435
Blaze Unlimited	Unlimited	$489	$855

Still cheaper than ZOL’s current prices

This is still much cheaper than ZOL’s current prices for their LTE product. For unlimited Wibroniks you need to fork out $1 216.00 ZWL while TelOne is only asking for $855 RTGS in comparison. That is a massive difference. The gulf widens when you consider the fact that TelOne’s unlimited package is theoratically faster at 20 Mbps while ZOL speeds are capped at 15 Mbps.

ZOL has several tricks up it’s sleeve though, they wouldn’t be Zimbabwe’s biggest ISP otherwise. Unlike TelOne you can actually sign up for ZOL LTE just by walking into a ZOL shop or one of their affiliates, that’s something you can simply not do when it comes to TelOne. Ever since they announced Blaze the sales and marketing departments have clearly been out of sync with each other.

There have been extended stock out periods and it seems TelOne simply cannot keep up with demand. Often they are out of modems which are hopelessly underpriced for whatever reason resulting in lengthy stockouts.

Then there is what is for me the real deal-breaker, that’s if you don’t already consider the run-around you get when you try to sign up a deal breaker, Blaze is not mobile. Yes you read that right, this is fixed LTE. You have to live in your cell (area covered by cell tower) otherwise the service won’t work. That’s just how it is.

Still not convinced. Here is another one, even if you do, by some stroke of luck, actually get a modem and SIM, you will normally have to wait for days before they activate the service. Who knows maybe they actually have to locate your local cell tower, scale it and program it to allow you to authenticate on their network.

Cheap can be expensive.