Vodacom Tanzania: The better choice too!

The beauty of travelling is that you do get exposed to different aspects of life other than what you would consider the norm back at home. Here I am in Dar es Salaam, using my Safaricom pre-paid line on Tanzania's Vodacom platform.

What suprised on Monday when I landed here, was that pleasant suprise that the Safaricom 200 postpaid customer care line is actually accessible to us prepaid users! Now that was a shocker for me!

Anyway aside from that, the only dissapointment was that I could not surf on my Samsung E250 as the Safaricom GPRS settings here are not valid. Upon calling Safaricom customer care, they did actually inform me that they were working on that technicaility. It was good to call and sms home at the same rate as though we were back home. The only downside, Safaricom scratch cards are hard to come by here, and if you do get them, watch out for the extra service charge. Maybe one day they might operate like Celtel, where you can use the local scratch cards to top up your line.

The pleasant experience was the 3G service offered by Vodacom here. Here they offer anything from a 500 MB internet bundle per month at Ksh. 3,500 to an astonishingly 2 GIG bundle per month at Ksh. 9,600! Now that is what we have been talking about for so long. They also offer 3G HSDPA Data Card (Huawei E620) and the USB Modem (Huawei E220) to both postpaid and prepaid users, though still yet to confirm what the actual download and upload speed rates are. Apart from the traditional services they also offer support for video calls.

But not too worry Safaricom has just unveiled plans to roll out the 3G mobile platform in Kenya by December! After all, they are both subsidiaries of the UK Vodafone company, or aren't they?