Brian Chiware
For the average Zimbabwean executive, trader or learner, the daily telecommunications experience is an exercise in endurance.
Dropped calls in the middle of transactions, erratic latency on video calls, throttled data throughput during peak hours and sudden blackouts on base stations during load-shedding cycles or electric faults have become chronic realities.
Yet, turn to the quarterly sector performance reports released by the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ), and an alternate reality frequently emerges — one dominated by high compliance scores, aggregated averages and historical data.
The central problem is structural: Periodic oversight cannot govern an instantaneous economy.
POTRAZ traditionally evaluates quality of service (QoS) using retrospective post-processing — relying on historical performance measurement (PM) counter dumps submitted by mobile network operators (MNOs) and periodic, scheduled drive-testing campaigns.
While technically grounded under Statutory Instrument 42 of 2016, periodic auditing measures what happened weeks or months ago.
It does not measure what a consumer is experiencing right now.
In a digitalised economy where mobile money platforms, cloud accounting, point-of-sale terminals and emergency communications run over cellular infrastructure, lagging oversight might not be ideal.
It is time for Zimbabwe to transition from post-mortem audits to continuous, automated, real-time QoS monitoring.
Flaws of the periodic regime
Periodic monitoring suffers from three fundamental weaknesses that distort market accountability.
First, the fallacy of aggregated averages.
A quarterly report that reflects an average call setup success rate of 98 percent sounds exceptional on paper.
However, that figure conceals severe localised degradations such as severe cell congestion in high-density suburbs between 5pm and 8pm or prolonged weekend downtimes in regional business hubs.
Averages wash away the pain points of the digital divide.
The second weakness is selective optimisation (The “drive-test effect”).
Periodic drive-tests conducted across designated highway corridors and urban thoroughfares are predictable.
Operators can identify scheduled testing windows and prioritise network routing, power allocation and tower maintenance around those specific parameters, presenting an inflated depiction of operational readiness.
And thirdly, delayed regulatory enforcement.
When an outage or prolonged packet-loss storm occurs, POTRAZ’s enforcement mechanism relies on reconciliation cycles that can take weeks or months.
Fines or compliance notices arrive long after consumers have suffered uncompensated financial disruption and stranded airtime.
The business case for continuous, real-time telemetry
Real-time QoS monitoring is neither experimental nor cost-prohibitive; regulators across multiple African and European jurisdictions have implemented continuous network probe frameworks and passive signal-monitoring platforms.
Non-intrusive core integration: By deploying automated signalling probes at interconnect exchanges and peering points, POTRAZ can obtain near-instantaneous telemetry on jitter, latency, packet drop and call termination rates without invading user privacy or interfering with network throughput.
Crowdsourced end-user quality of experience (QoE): While POTRAZ has initiated steps toward end-user measurement tools, a national push integrating passive telemetry into citizen devices and high-frequency background diagnostics provides an unvarnished, street-level map of delivered service across all provinces.
Automated penalty and SLA triggers: Moving to dynamic dashboards allows
regulatory penalties to trigger automatically when mean opinion scores (MOS) or throughput collapse below statutory thresholds, providing immediate commercial incentives for operators to invest in battery backup, alternative backhaul and spectrum efficiency.
If Zimbabwe’s Vision 2030 digital economy agenda is to be credible, reliable connectivity cannot remain a gamble.
Regulatory intervention must operate at the speed of data packets, not quarterly paperwork.
Brian Chiware is a commentator on tech issues.
