TelOne has entered into a joint agreement with National University of Science and Technology, (NUST) to set up a telecommunications research laboratory. The number of Zimbabweans still holding on to a landline has decreased consistently over the years.
Speaking during the unveiling yesterday, TelOne managing director, Chipo Mtasa, highlighted the need to for the company to be innovative.
“People have started opting for other services and it’s good because technology has evolved so much that they are other services that have evolved,” she said.
“The way we had been structured, the way we were making money, it was just out of the voice-the landline. This is why TelOne then says in a few years’ time, we will be dead if we continue to rely on these landlines because it is a dying business in a way because we will not get as much as we did before,” Mrs Mtasa added.
The humble landline telephone is living on borrowed time. The quality of our mobile networks and the convenience of having your phone wherever you go has been a major factor in the inevitable decline of the landline.
“So as a team along with the direction from our principles, the shareholder as well as the board, we then said lets transform TelOne so that it’s a converged services operator. Which means you can still do your voice landline but you can have other services which the market desire and are stemming out of the advent of the internet.” Mrs Mtasa explained.
“As TelOne, it is our expectations lab that there will be lots of new value-added services that were the brainchild of the laboratory at Nust. Educational institutions play a pivotal role in this country, in terms of development and investment in education will always be a legacy that surpasses generation. TelOne being a generation company investing in education is not a mistake because we are saying we are investing in our future long after we are gone.” She added.
“We then looked and searched around as we only knew the landline business. So to then change and transform to be able to offer those other services, we felt we did not have the capability by ourselves. What we also noticed worldwide is that almost every telecommunication company is also looking out to do more research, developing new products and many other things,” she continued.
NUST pro-vice chancellor, Samson Sibanda said “It is for that reason that is telecommunications laboratory will go a long way in affording our researchers and scholars opportunities to assimilate knowledge and utilize it. There has been a call for institutions of higher learning to be relevant to society and relevant to the communities that they find themselves in. I trust that this lab will facilitate research that will research that will solve many problems that surround us in this digital and information era.”
