GPRS services get to Malawi at last

Malawi is now hooked to the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS). Zain Malawi introduced the new generation communication service to beat other mobile network operators. The company has since gone on a marketing campaign for the product.

Zain Malawi Public Relations Manager Edith Tsirizani said in an interview in Lilongwe, that the company has organized series of mobile fun activities that are targeting the youth who are major consumers of Information Communication Technology (ICT) gadgets in the country.

She said with the latest developments in the mobile phone technology her company had in store several products it wanted to offer on the Malawi market. “Youths are the biggest customers of ICT products so at Zain we have come up with products that target this modern day generation of ICT youths," she said.

She said the GPRS system which is used by GSM Mobile phones has been the most common mobile phone system in the world as of 2004, but Malawi was left out in this international communication development.

“The internet is an information hub and the GPRS which is used for transmitting IP packets is an essential component of the social life of today’s youth who would like to download music from the World Wide Web,” she said.

Speaking in an interview, Linda Magera Jere who has been a Zain customer since the company started operating in Malawi as Celtel said that the GPRS had made her communication needs easier. She said she now can easily interact with her friends on the internet using a mobile phone.

"This service is ideal as I can access the internet anywhere using my mobile phone,” she said. Malawi has two mobile phone service providers - Zain and TNM with the former controlling the market with over 1.2 million lines.

However Zain’s GPRS Core Network is the first centralized part of the GPRS system in Malawi providing support for WCDMA based 3G networks.