One they seemingly don’t want to solve…

Liquid Home (Formerly ZOL) and TelOne have gained a lot of love over the past year for their LTE data offerings, named Wibroniks and Blaze respectively, and for good reason too. As long as you live in a supported area, these lines have proven to be a great home internet solution as well as a far more affordable one compared to conventional mobile networks like Econet and NetOne. So obviously anyone who wants greatly priced data would flock to these packages. Except if you live in places like Harare where demand is high, you likely can’t get a line as both Liquid and TelOne will constantly tell you they’re out of lines or the area you want to use it in is filled with no bandwidth to spare. Which while it sucks, does make sense. Except if you have anything from an extra $50 to $250 USD you can buy a line on the black market TODAY. Which begs the question: if these lines are in such short supply, why is there a constant black market of people selling them at and seemingly no efforts to shut it down.

My brother recently just got us an LTE line from Liquid after literally months of waiting and checking if our area (Kuwadzana) could have any space. Less than a day after he got our line, a friend from the same area couldn’t get a line either. Again, high demand. But if our friend goes on Facebook marketplace right now they can get someone who will sell them a Liquid Line or TelOne line, probably with no ego-locking, from around $50 and going up. Just look at the screenshot of a chat below when we were doing research for this article.

$260 USD. That’s how much one seller was charging for a non-geo-locked Liquid line. And yes this is the upper end of those insane prices, byt other sellers go to about $50 and scale up from there. These dealers know that the lines are near impossible to get without waiting for the average person so they’ve taken that as a chance to exorbitantly charge the average buyer. So much so that many people actually think $50 is the price for a Liquid/ZOL line. Another friend of ours from Bindura got one last month and called me in surprise that it cost him $1 to get the line. People actually think rip-off prices are the norm now and don’t expect getting a line to be easy or simple.

Which brings up the very important point : why don’t TelOne or Liquid get ahead of this and fix it? After all there’s now a clear vibrant black market for these lines that it’s impossible for them not to notice what’s going on. And more importantly there is actual harm to the companies if a certain part of your market believes your lines are either : 1) unobtainable or 2) extremely expensive. So why hasn’t anything been done?

Well, no conclusive answer has been given there. But of course everyone has the same assumption: maybe some people at these companies benefit from the black market. After all when you get a line you get an account number or registration number required to use said lines ,meaning there’s at least one person in either company helping these guys out. Will those people ever be caught or this whole black market situation ever dealt with? It better be, because while this situation may have not started out as Liquid of TelOne’s fault, it’s slowly becoming theirs. These companies are the ones who lack the infrastructure to gain higher capacities of users. That’s fine. But then letting shady players take advantage of that and overcharge users for services that should be cheaper and easier to access is not so forgivable . Hopefully both of these companies see this and decide to act, because if they don’t, then they can’t be surprised when users blame them for the dismal state of the market when it comes to buying these lines.

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