For years, Zimbabwe's largest fixed ISP collected a monthly fee called "ONT Insurance." The device was worth ~$25. The annual fee was $24. Then the name changed — but the billing did not.
Deep Dive Data · 2026 · Independent analysis
Liquid Home Zimbabwe — formerly ZOL, Zimbabwe's dominant fixed broadband provider — charged a monthly fee called ONT Insurance as a standard line item on fibre subscriber invoices. ONT stands for Optical Network Terminal: the router-like device installed at the customer's premises. The fee was approximately $2 per month, applied automatically, framed as cover against damage, loss, or theft of the device.
Insurance pricing is built around expected loss — the probability of a claim, multiplied by the cost to settle it, plus an operating margin. For a $25 device, a well-priced policy might recover the replacement cost over three to five years — implying a premium of $0.40 to $0.70 per month.
At $2/month, the annual premium-to-asset ratio was 96%. In insurance terms, a loss ratio of 96% would be catastrophic for an insurer. Here it means something different: it is what the customer pays, not what gets paid out. This does not mean no claims were ever paid — it means the pricing structure bears no visible relationship to the underlying risk.
Using POTRAZ quarterly subscriber data as a proxy for the fibre customer base, we can estimate total premiums collected since 2018. The methodology is conservative: annual average subscriber figures, flat $2/month rate, fibre subscribers only.
| Year | Est. avg. subscribers | Annual rate | Est. collection |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 39,000 | $24 | $936,000 |
| 2019 | 39,500 | $24 | $948,000 |
| 2020 | 47,000 | $24 | $1,128,000 |
| 2021 | 60,000 | $24 | $1,440,000 |
| 2022 | 68,000 | $24 | $1,632,000 |
| 2023 | 74,000 | $24 | $1,776,000 |
| 2024 | 79,000 | $24 | $1,896,000 |
| 2025 (9 mo.) | 80,000 | $2/mo | $1,440,000 |
| Total 2018–2025 | — | ~$11.2 million | |
Subscriber figures from POTRAZ fixed internet subscription data. Assumes all fibre subscribers were charged. If LTE/WibroniX subscribers were also charged, the total would be materially higher. This estimate is conservative.
The Insurance and Pensions Commission of Zimbabwe (IPEC) licences entities that wish to underwrite insurance risk. Collecting a fee described as "insurance" — against a risk, on behalf of customers — without holding such a licence is not a technical oversight. It is the operating definition of unlicensed insurance.
IPEC records do not show Liquid Home holding a short-term insurance licence during the period the product was described as "insurance."
Deep Dive Data holds invoices from consecutive billing periods on the same Liquid Home account. They show the name change precisely — not gradually, not vaguely, but within one month.
If the product had genuinely been a "guarantee" all along — a contractual commitment rather than insurance — there would have been no reason to rename it. The rename itself is the evidence that the original description was understood to be problematic.
The rename was not a gradual evolution. It happened within a single billing cycle — suggesting an abrupt internal decision, almost certainly in response to awareness that describing the product as insurance, without an insurance licence, was legally untenable.
Subscribers who attempted to cancel the ONT insurance were refused. The company's own admission confirms that the fee was optional throughout — which means every refusal was incorrect by Liquid Home's own account.
Liquid Home's ONT fee was a small charge. Easy to miss on an invoice. Reasonable-sounding in isolation. Across tens of thousands of subscribers, collected for seven years, by a company without an insurance licence, at a fee rate nearly equal to the annual replacement value of the device — it is something else. And when regulatory pressure arrived, the response was to rename the product, not to refund it.
Deep Dive Data has reached out to Liquid Home Zimbabwe for comment. This article will be updated if a response is received.
Enter when you first got your Liquid Home / ZOL fibre connection and how many modems you've bought or replaced. We'll calculate your estimated total.
Estimate based on $2/month fee. Assumes continuous billing from your join date. Actual amount may vary depending on billing periods and whether you successfully cancelled.
Check your past invoices for either of the following line items:
This analysis is based on publicly available POTRAZ sector data, customer-reported invoice documentation, and IPEC licensing records. It does not constitute legal advice. The estimated $11.2 million figure is a conservative model; the actual total depends on what proportion of subscribers were charged and for how long.
Deep Dive Data covers Zimbabwe capital markets and financial products. This article was produced independently. No relationship exists with Liquid Home Zimbabwe, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Cassava Technologies, or IPEC.