By 
By Ross Moyo
Econet Wireless has identified the single biggest drag on customer experience — power — after AI analysis showed almost 60% of network faults were power-related.
Group CEO Dr Douglas Mboweni disclosed the finding in a note to shareholders, saying it has triggered a national power overhaul.
The operator is rolling out solar panels and battery storage across its base station portfolio and will commission its own power plant in February to feed switching centres and data centres.
Why This Is Heavy:
For a mobile operator carrying 82% of Zimbabwe’s data and 88% of voice traffic, power is not a support function — it is the network. Zimbabwe’s grid instability means every outage translates to site downtime, dropped calls and degraded throughput.
By building a captive power plant for core nodes plus solar + battery at edge, Econet is moving from diesel-dependent uptime to hybrid resilience. The February commissioning date coincides with peak rainy season cloud cover — a deliberate test of battery autonomy.
This is the AI dividend: not chatbot customer service, but root-cause analysis that links customer complaints to electron flow.
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