Because no one should ever have to remember all this nonsense, or have to track it all down, here is a Tanzanian Internet Phone: Phone Cheat Sheet.  If this doesn’t make sense to you, read the text below and then return to the table later.

Contained within is my attempt to clarify Kenya Tanzania’s mobile phone situation for new visitors, especially current and future Peace Corps volunteers, who may not be the most technical people.

BEFORE YOU LEAVE FOR Kenya TANZANIA TO LIVE HERE FOR TWO YEARS

The Peace Corps recommends that you wait to buy a phone until you arrive.  I disagree.  Good phones here are rare, old, expensive, hard to find, and sometimes fake.  Buy a tri-or-quad band phone with 3G on eBay.  Size of the screen, keyboard, etc, is entirely up to you.  Small Nokias go unnoticed here because everyone has them, but nice phones unavoidably look expensive, and phone theft is reasonably common here, especially in Dar, so don’t spend your life savings. Current suggestions: the Nokia 6220 Classic (no WiFi) or N79 (with WiFi).  The WiFi is good because you can leech off of other people’s Internet, if you can find it, without toting your laptop around town.  Great for downloading big files that would cost you a lot otherwise.

If you already own such a phone, but it’s locked into a contract, cancel your service but beforehand tell them you’re leaving the country and YOU NEED THE UNLOCK CODES.  They will give them to you if you persist, then just follow the instructions so your phone will work in other countries. If you are buying a new phone, make sure it is UNLOCKED.

Also buy a USB cable that will connect your phone to your laptop.  BUY THIS IN AMERICA, because not only is it expensive and hard to find here, good luck even describing what you want to the phone store employee who mostly sells tacky faceplates.

Before you leave the US, install these program on your phone, or at least note them down so you can get them later:

• Web browser: Opera Mini (if you have a Blackberry you NEED to download and install this before you disconnect your US service)
  
  
• Email: Gmail Mobile (or if you use Hotmail or something else, the appropriate program if you can find it).  Gmail Mobile also works with Google Apps, which is how I have it set up.
  
• Maps: Google Maps Mobile
  
• Text chat: Skype Mobile
  
• Alternate browser: TeaShark
  
  

 
 

THE PHONE COMPANIES

You will decide on your phone company once you get here.  Most volunteers have traditionally chosen Zain for specific deals but have recently dispersed:

• Vodacom, the incumbent, first phone company
  
• Zain (previously Celtel), the second largest phone company.
• Tigo (previously Mobitel), original discount company, often used by students
• Zantel, fair nationwide coverage, discount company started in Zanzibar, acquired by a French (?) company EtiSalat
• TTCL, landline provider, CDMA mobile, and DSL provider, mentioned here for completeness, generally not a contender.

To get a line from any of these companies, just buy a SIM card in a shop that has a sign that says “Nunua Linei ya Simu hapa.”  Pretty simple, just pop it into your phone and then follow the instructions.  You can also buy little credit card-looking things with scratch-off codes that will add credit to your SIM card.  If you buy SIMs from different companies, each will have its own starting digits for the phone number.

THE DIFFERENT CALLING PLANS

The calling plans are pretty complicated even before you start worrying about Internet.  Most companies have at least two “tariffs,” which is to say different plans.  They change a lot, so I won’t bother itemizing them, but after you’ve settled down here, ask around and look out for the fact that:

• Nights & Weekends (after 9pm+Weekends),
  
• Family/Circle of Friends
• None of these things affects the cost of the Internet, which is where all my money goes, since domestic calls and texts are really not that expensive and incoming calls (including international) are free.

Usually you are allowed to change your tariff once a month.  The way you accomplish this is the same way that you accomplish most things with these companies: you type cryptic, mostly undocumented numbers into your phone and hope that they work.  Usually they resemble *123# or #123#, were 123 are the secret numbers.  Sometimes you will hear people, and even advertisements say, “send a blank SMS to 123,” but I’ve never seen this work.  You usually need to type *123# or #123# (or whatever numbers) directly into your phone and dial. 

THE INTERNET ON YOUR PHONE

So now you want the Internet, both on your phone and on your laptop.  Let’s review how to do this.  First of all, good job, you bought a 3G phone, this leaves your options open.

To make the Internet work on your phone, what you need to do varies depending on your carrier.

For Vodacom:

For Zain: Send an SMS to 232 that says “all”.  (No quotes, all lowercase.)  You will get a message on your phone asking you to download your settings.  Do so.  This worked right away for me, and interestingly, if you pop in a Zain SIM and set it up, you can use the same settings for Vodacom.  I usually just leave my phone on the Zain settings and I can swap SIMs and surf the Internet with either with no problem. 

When trying to apply to the internet service by texting in as described above, if the Zain network doesn’t happen to recognize your model of modem or phone it will give an ambiguous message and fail to enable your line. Then you will need to find another internet capable phone to activate service from (preferably a Nokia as most of these seem recognized). Line must be activated before internet is available.

For Tigo: ???

Send a blank text to 1234 (or my guess, call #1234#).  The text does nothing when I try and my guess doesn’t work either, but at least it says “coming soon” when you try.

It’s worth noting that if you have trouble with this, and you have a Nokia, your phone has a support option somewhere (depends on the model) where you can have Nokia send you your settings, in case your carrier is being dumb.  This is what I did at first for Safaricom.  If that fails, enter the APNs manually into your phone using the cheat sheet table.

For Zantel: Send a text with “wap” or “internet” to 15098. You should get a system message back with the phone settings.

THE INTERNET ON YOUR LAPTOP

You will probably also want to use your phone as a modem (called “tethering”) for your computer.  You can do this even if the Internet on the phone itself isn’t working.  These things are actually unrelated, which is usually sad to realize after struggling to get one to work… that was just the first hurdle!

Most brand name phones have some sort of software package you can install on your computer.  I connect through “Nokia PC Suite,” which is free and has presets for Vodacom & Celtel (now Zain).  I think it may even work on non-Nokia devices.  Anyhow, the more you can do on this front before you leave, the better, because downloading programs needed in order to access the Internet is incredibly difficult when you don’t have Internet.  The steps for this are completely phone-specific.  Find the nearest computer guru and task him/her with helping you set this up in advance.

You can also accomplish the above through Bluetooth (wireless phone/laptop communication), but it takes up extra battery and is slower, so why bother?  Just buy the cable.

Before you leave, you should install on your laptop the following free programs:

• (bonus!) NetLimiter 2 Monitor Freeware – this is software that will watch to see how much of your internet speed is being used by each program on your computer. For example, you can see how many megabytes you downloaded with Mozilla Firefox on 21 September 2009. You can also see what is using all of your download speed or upload right now. Handy for tracking down bandwidth hogging programs. It can be the only tip you’d forgotten to turn off expensive autoupdates!
  
• http://m.google.com/?dc=gbackstop to enable access Google services like Gmail in whatever bandwidth format (standard, HTML, mobile) you prefer, even from your computer.
• ZoneAlarm or similar software firewall (blocks all sorts of annoying programs from taking up all your Internet)
  
• Opera web browser 10.0 or newer (syncs your bookmarks and stuff with Opera Mini): “Turbo Mode” can save you bandwidth!
  
  
• Firefox (and the below extensions)
  
  • ImgLikeOpera (more control over selectively allowing images)
    
    
  • Greasemonkey (needed to run the below)
    
    
    • custom GreaseMonkey Mowser Images script.  This is a simple script that will make all images pass through Mowser, which is a web site that converts sites into phone-friendly versions.  In this case I’m on a laptop so I don’t want the site to be changed, but Mowser also recompresses images. Anyhow, I still mostly keep images off, but when I selectively “load image” using ImgLikeOpera, this script actually loads it from Mowser to save a lot of bandwidth.  If this ever becomes popular I’m sure Mowser will just stop allowing this.
      
      
  • User Agent Switcher (needed to run the below)
    
    
    • custom User Agent list. You can trick sites into thinking you’re using any number of mobile phones, so they’ll give you streamlined versions of their pages.  Gmail for instance gives a cool little version for iPhone and Android, and a super-basic version for the other mobile browsers.
  • Flashblock (forces you click on a Flash element in order to start it— nice bandwidth saver!)
    
  • Adblock Plus
    
    
  • Google Gears (may help you if you use Wordpress or other web apps that can take advantage of it)
    
  • Type about:config into the Firefox address bar and change the rightmost values so they match the below.
    accessibility.blockautorefresh;true
    
    browser.cache.check_doc_frequency;2
    
    browser.chrome.favicons;false
    
    browser.chrome.site_icons;false
    
    network.prefetch-next;false
    
    
  • Do the same for the following, but you will also need to right-click and select “New -> Integer” and type everything to the left of the semicolon.  Then enter the number value to the right.  Doing so will save you a little time and bandwidth because you will have to contact your DNS servers less often.
    Network.dnsCacheExpiration;3600
    network.dnsCacheEntries;1000
• Windows Live Writer or similar offline blogging program, great if you have a blog.
  
• Mozilla Thunderbird (and try to set up your email on it before you leave—it’s nice to be able to read old emails and open attachments without having to get online every time)
  
  

Because you pay your phone carrier per megabyte (upload/download combined), all of those little auto-update programs on your computer can cost you money and can also slow everything else down.  ZoneAlarm takes care of this by asking you every time a program wants to connect to the Internet.  Get used to saying “No” a lot.  Even with this, you will notice that the Internet on your laptop costs more than on your phone.  This is because the web browser on your phone intercepts data and compresses it before giving it to you, which saves money for you.  This is called a “transcoding proxy server.”  Mozilla Fennec and Opera 10.0 do the same things for your laptop, so use them when you can.  Images cost more than text, so in Opera I stay in “cached images” mode, and only download images when I really need to, and they will then show up on subsequent visits to that page.  Firefox seems to have a clunkier images off/on method, so I use Firefox only for site that use Gears.  Google it and see if any site that you regularly visit can take advantage of Gears.  Live Writer is also great because you can prepare blog entries before you go online, and then you can simply press one button and let it go.  It will shrink the images before uploading them and prevent annoying copy/paste.

WHICH INTERNET PLAN TO GET?

If you set up all the above and take no extra steps, credit will simply deplete from your account on a per-megabyte basis.  The rates, to my knowledge, are as follows:

• Vodacom: 254 shillings per megabyte
  
• Zain: 470 shillings per megabyte
• Tigo: 200 shillings per megabyte
• Zantel: 100 shillings per megabyte

An MP3, for example, is about 3 megabytes.  Using Skype Video in a rural area will take up maybe 1MB per minute.  These are ballpark numbers if you are not familiar with such things.

If you use more than, say, 50MB per month, you should look into some of the more specific data plans.

• Zain Prepaid: There are discounts by pre-purchasing megabytes for three month blocks in advance. It does expire after 3mo. I believe 500mb is sold for 160/= just the regular per-MB rate, 200MB and less packages are available at the store. If Zain is the only provider in your area or it seems faster due to its fiber connection these might pay off.
  
• Vodacom Prepaid: 60,000/= per month for unlimited internet. This may be related to an international unlimited data deal also available through USA/Verizon ($60/mo).
• Zantel CDMA Unlimited: For 90,000/= per month you can get unlimited Zantel internet through a semi-proprietary Zantel CDMA/EVDO modem. They will also sell you “unlimited” 3GB plans on GSM/EDGE for 90,000/=.

   
   

PHONE-SPECIFIC DATA PLANS

Each company has a flagship phone that they’d like to sell you, but if you show up from America with that phone, you can probably just get into the phone-specific deal if you want.

I don’t know the ins and outs of the deals in this category for Tanzania so refer back to the Kenya guide for the gist of this section and visit the respective stores downtown Dar or at Milimani city Mall where they are all together.

SPEED

Zain has 3G in Dar Es Salaam only with Mwanza/Arusha in planning as of Aug 2009. Vodacom advertises 3G in large cities around Tanzania. Zantel has 3G in many larger cities around TZ using its CDMA modem but otherwise only EDGE.

Tanzania lags behind Kenya in acknowledged fiber adoption. Zain has officially connected the fiber to its data hub in Dar and has better responsiveness as a result. I haven’t heard updates from the other vendors.

Since there are limited capacity on the towers, if other people are using the internet or heavily using the cell service, you may be affected. For EDGE all carriers hovers around 50kbps down / 20kbps up.  (Of course, if you don’t have a 3G phone, you’ll never get 3G speeds.  Hence my earlier recommendation, as all the networks are promising to go 3G “eventually.” though for Tanzania this may take a rather longer time than in Kenya, given Zain’s slow adoption to date)

CONCLUSION / WHICH TO GET?

Internet in Tanzania, like phone calls, are expensive versus neighboring Kenya but you generally don’t have to worry about contracts and thanks to Zain, internet is available even in many of the most remote Peace Corps-post villages.

If you are in an area where you get a 3G connection, you might consider Vodacom.  Theoretically the speed should be better.  You can also get a dedicated modem from them if you don’t want to always be plugging in your phone.  Just be aware that it’s not unlimited, so Skype Video and Windows Update will eat that data plan for breakfast.  Then again maybe you can find a friendly and cheap Internet cafes to offset your data usage in your major banking town.

If you are not in such an area, Vodacom Unlimited looks like the best deal if you can stomach the 60,000 shillings.  Then you never have to worry about another megabyte, you only have to worry about the 1 month recurring payment.  They’ll also be happy to sell you a modem.

If that’s too much money, any of the Vodacom’s/Zantel prepay plans seems good.  Just pick the one that you know you’ll use up in 30 days (90 days with Zain), and if you start to go over, just add more.  It’s way cheaper than paying the same 470 shillings per minute all the time with basic Zain.

PERIPHERALLY RELATED:

I feel like I also need to mention the following:

Zantel has confusing CDMA vs GSM networks. They also sell 2G EDGE modem devices at their store, further confusing their system. Make sure you know what you are buying if you shop at their stores. Expect if you buy the CDMA (its fast 3G internet tech is called EVDO) then you will be completely out of luck if you leave their very limited CDMA network. GSM/EDGE is practically national with many options.

 
 

Some areas also have WiMax as an option.  There are two kinds of WiMax: regular and mobile.  Regular WiMax means you basically need an antennae on your roof.  Mobile kind of resembles the tethering options discussed above, although you need to buy a special WiMax modem.  Different companies provide different services, and usually just around Dar Es Salaam. At least one popular service uses proprietary Navini pre-WiMax box devices.

POSTSCRIPT

Go back and look at the table— it will make sense now and you won’t have to reread all this text unless you’re looking for the lists of programs.

Any chance you would be willing to add some of it to the African Signals wiki on internet and web costs in Africa?
One Computer at a Time

Tanzania, despite being admirably peaceful, has not yet achieved much in the ICT field. The reaction to the recent fiber installation has been muted. Its labor market is different too. Where only 10% of Uganda’s Makerere Computer Science graduates get jobs, Peace Corps Tanzania hasn’t been able to hire a single qualified ICT manager for its offices in six months of desperate searching. It is clear Tanzania is still scaling up its labor pool where the other countries nearby are ready to be leveraged. To me this means that Education has a lot of untapped potential. It is a very big country. Its education system was long neglected by colonialists, was always several orders of magnitude smaller than neighbors, and it is often hamstrung by bureaucracy but it is just now starting to explode.

Even through their short 2yr careers volunteer colleagues teaching A-Level have seen amazing improvements in students. Though many are failing, these are indications quality are starting to trend up. There have been challenges, like the Ministry’s poor scheduling that has resulted in empty colleges more than half the year but last week new syllabi were released which leaves me with hope that they at least realize the problems.

I intend to come back to USA for at least the next four months but after that I’m not sure. I’d like to help and work on these issues if the right opportunity appears. Judging from the relative noise on Twitter TZ vs. Twitter .UG, .KE, ICT4D members, there is so little work being done here, esp in TZ, I think my unique cultural experience and connections might enable me to foster something pretty neat.

By the way, here is one of the few neat TZ projects–NoPC, a British thin-client+cell net initiative for secondary schools instead of Teachers Colleges.

For now I have been working on a blog for Information Computer Technology (ICT) Teachers College trainers around Tanzania at TZ’s 33 Teachers colleges. I’m really working to keep the context appropriate for them with a bit more straightforward English and complete explanations of concepts without too much expectation of previous knowledge. It is a challenge, but a good one.

You can read the blog at:
http://ttctip.wordpress.com/

TTC Tip Blog

I’ve found over the past six or eight months that writing here was a funny combination of audiences and it was tough to manage in my head so I wrote sparingly. So far this other outlet is working better. It is a good solution to a problem of travel: I had been trying to visit many of the Teachers Colleges in huge Tanzania to introduce some ideas but Peace Corps had been discouraging it. Travel by road in Tanzania isn’t particularly safe and doing it often is a bad idea. Thankfully I’d realized that the one thing that unites all the teachers colleges is internet. They can all read blogs. Fantastic. So here we go!

10/2008

 
 

1/2009

October was probably one of the most frustrating months at site just based on physical environment. I was very thankful for my cushy Zanzibar vacation weeks before. It is pretty depressing when the mountains all around are completely barren and formerly lush cropland is nothing but sand. Fortunately I got another volunteer at my college in the middle of the month. Two Wazungu volunteers (white westerners) total joined my district bringing us back up to six individuals. In October, many new birds started to pass through too though this one is pretty common all year. The Cordon Blue darts around my house eating seeds, presumably.

Sometimes sunsets do great things with the otherwise dull brown. My counterpart Allan swings by my house to say hello on a slow afternoon without electricity. “Counterpart” is a loose Peace Corps term which indicates somebody who you like to work with in your community. You’re only suppose to have a couple but I end up throwing the term around a lot in various contexts.

Power was a big frustration this season: shortages of water mean hydroelectric plants starts to fail and our electric company was preparing for the strong rains so was taking the power down for 12 hours every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday to replace termite eaten poles in the hundred-some miles straight of non-redundant medium-capacity wires running from our regional capital, Dodoma town. They then run back down into the distant bottom of our large-ish district by another route which has a dam and reservoir. Our district sources its own power but quixotically has the most unreliable coverage from these services.

A random classroom at my college adjacent to my IT compound. Thank goodness for student teachers for watering all the plants keeping my workplace green as it was. Unfortunately this term turned out to only have six weeks of time with students around and four or five weeks of students in classes. This effectively means I saw each of my students four times in the entire term and for many, half of these times were without power. Thankfully, we have a generator which can run all ~100 computers so in at least half of the classes we generated power to teach computers (at significant expense). Almost none of the other 33 teachers colleges in Tanzania have generators so would be completely stranded by periods like this.

The problems which delay and shorten the national teachers college term are many but initially most of the problems stemmed back to the Ministry of Education which was several months late in accepting and assigning student teachers to the individual national teachers colleges. A mitigating factor: after national exams are graded many of the students are waiting to hear about university acceptances and often decline at the last possible minute. Another factor: the Ministry of Education seems to have lost a huge chunk of its funding thanks to a parliamentary gambit to shirk transparency requirements made by donor nations. In recent months this has caused mild but persistent teacher unrest due to unpaid salaries.

Secondary school students from distant Chamwino Secondary catch a breeze with me near the cell phone tower on the hill above my town. Initially they were a bit skittish about helping a Mzungu white person with his photography–you should see the smeared expression on their faces in a panorama I was trying to cut them out of. Then I explained I was a teacher and that I actually knew some of their teachers and that I was a teacher. They quickly cooled off as we chatted about their school and even smiled! I love cultural connections. Its also fortunate that teachers are one of the most culturally respected positions in Tanzania (much like doctors in America) .

I ventured up the mountain for the first time in quite a while as the first rain in some eight weeks had just plowed the dust from the skies leading to some of the best dry season vistas yet. My two other fast friends on the hill included the guards of the cell phone tower. Here they are resting in the moist air as the rain dissipated.

The guards’ adobe. I wish I had caught the contrast between it and the tower just behind the camera which has electric fences, 24 hour air conditioning and a huge modern generator. He had been working here for several months and had recently changed jobs: he used to be a guard at our nearby mountain livestock college. He hadn’t yet been through a rainy season. I’m anxious to visit him again and ask about how it has gone now that everything is green, green, green.

Above my house; Find the red flame tree in the right half of the image and look for the blue door hiding under it. That is my house. The satellite dish near the bottom-middle flame tree are my nearest neighbors houses. The sat-dish house is my counterpart Allan’s. The flame trees are typically called Christmas trees around here since their fantastic color lasts until about that time.

A hunch and little patience on the hill rewarded: Here is a very mildly High-dynamic range (HDR) shot taken from the cell tower just after a fierce twenty minute rain storm forced me into the little hut pictured above.

Rains aren’t all fun and blossoms. My poor students didn’t realize it would rain today, after all for the most part it hadn’t since they started term. Their shoes got soaked. The rain also brought out a number of sleeping critters: winged, awkwardly flight-capable termites who use it as a signal to fly into the air, get knocked down by raindrops, promptly lose their wings, mate and proliferate randomly around for maximum dispersal.

Frogs and toads seem to have caught onto this behavior and they also are awakened by this first major rain. I spotted 15 in the small green area around our ICT compound

Scorpions aren’t so much cued as forced out of their crannies by the flood. This one decided higher ground was the nook under my doorstep. Scorpions bark is much worse than their bite (granted I haven’t been bitten) but they are sure fun to play with when you have stove tongs (pictured decending).

So I admit, I chucked him into the spiders nest hoping to force a faceoff. No such luck.