DEEP DIVE DATAZimbabwe's internet packages, ranked by what you actually pay per gigabyte.Not the headline price.
Providers advertise packages by price and by data cap. Neither number tells you if you're getting a good deal — cost per gigabyte does.
Line every package up on that single measure and the market splits hard: bulk fibre and unlimited-data deals sit near four cents a gigabyte, while small mobile data bundles run past a dollar fifty.
39 packages, 9 providers, one metric
- Liquid Home (FibroniX, WibroniX) — 7 packages
- TelOne (LTE, LTE Unlimited, Fibre) — 7 packages
- Utande (capped + Unlimited) — 5 packages
- Dolphin (LTE & Fibre Unlimited) — 2 packages
- Powertel (Unlimited) — 1 package
- Starlink (Lite, Standard, Roaming) — 3 packages
- Econet SmartBiz, Private WiFi, SmartSuite — 14 packages
Cost per GB = advertised price ÷ advertised data allowance. Prices as listed by each provider at time of comparison.
Powertel, Starlink and Dolphin's unlimited plans anchor the cheap end. Econet's small prepaid WiFi bundles sit alone at the top.
Ten lowest cost-per-GB packages
| Powertel Unlimited — $30/1000GB | $0.030 |
| Starlink Lite — $30/1000GB | $0.030 |
| TelOne Fibre — $40/1000GB | $0.040 |
| Econet SmartBiz 5 — $45/1000GB | $0.045 |
| Utande Unlimited — $49/1000GB | $0.049 |
| Starlink Standard — $50/1000GB | $0.050 |
| Dolphin LTE Unlimited — $55/1000GB | $0.055 |
| TelOne Fibre — $60/1000GB | $0.060 |
| Dolphin Fibre Unlimited — $70/1000GB | $0.070 |
| Econet SmartBiz 10 — $87/1200GB | $0.072 |
Powertel vs. Econet Private WiFi 5GB
$9 buys 5GB on Private WiFi. That same $9 buys roughly 300GB on Powertel's unlimited line. Same currency, 60× difference in what a gigabyte actually costs.
Econet Private WiFi, all four tiers
| Private WiFi 5GB — $9 | $1.800 |
| Private WiFi 18GB — $26.50 | $1.596 |
| Private WiFi 25GB — $38 | $1.520 |
| Private WiFi 10GB — $13 | $1.300 |
Every tier of this line sits above $1.30/GB — more than 20× the cost of TelOne's cheapest fibre package.
Unlimited beats capped almost everywhere.
Every provider that sells an "Unlimited" tier — TelOne, Utande, Dolphin, Powertel — prices it at $0.03–$0.10/GB. Their own capped, smaller-bundle packages from the same brand routinely cost 3–10× more per gigabyte. The bundle size, not the provider, is doing most of the work.
Econet spans the entire market on its own.
SmartBiz 5 costs $0.045/GB — competitive with TelOne's cheapest fibre. Private WiFi 5GB, sold by the same company, costs $1.80/GB. The single biggest determinant of what you pay Econet per gigabyte isn't the brand — it's which product line you buy into.
TelOne — the broadest cheap lineup
| LTE — $20/105GB | $0.190 |
| LTE — $25/215GB | $0.116 |
| LTE — $50/650GB | $0.077 |
| LTE Unlimited — $75/1000GB | $0.075 |
| Fibre — $40/1000GB | $0.040 |
| Fibre — $60/1000GB | $0.060 |
| Fibre — $90/1000GB | $0.090 |
TelOne's cheapest Fibre package is the second-lowest cost per GB in the whole dataset, and every one of its seven packages sits under $0.20/GB.
Liquid Home — mid-range, bundle-dependent
| FibroniX — $43/100GB | $0.430 |
| FibroniX — $65/150GB | $0.433 |
| FibroniX — $60/200GB | $0.300 |
| FibroniX — $75/300GB | $0.250 |
| WibroniX — $50/200GB | $0.250 |
| WibroniX — $99/500GB | $0.198 |
| FibroniX Unlimited — $99/1000GB | $0.099 |
Liquid Home's cost per GB improves steadily as the bundle gets bigger — its Unlimited tier is more than 4× cheaper per GB than its smallest FibroniX package.
Utande, Starlink and the capped-data outliers
| Utande — $15/25GB | $0.600 |
| Utande — $25/50GB | $0.500 |
| Utande — $35/75GB | $0.467 |
| Utande Unlimited — $49/1000GB | $0.049 |
| Utande Unlimited — $100/1000GB | $0.100 |
| Starlink Roaming — $85/1000GB | $0.085 |
Utande's own smallest capped packages cost up to 12× more per GB than its Unlimited tier — the same pattern seen at TelOne, Liquid Home and Econet.
It's the bundle size that sets the price, not the headline fee.
A $9 package and a $417 package can land on opposite ends of value depending on what each buys. Econet's SmartBiz 50 ($417 for 1500GB, $0.278/GB) is a worse deal per gigabyte than its own SmartBiz 5 ($45 for 1000GB, $0.045/GB) — paying more doesn't guarantee a better rate.
A package with a lower cost per GB isn't automatically the better buy if it's slower, capped in practice, or unreliable in your area.
Buy the biggest bundle you'll actually use
Across every provider in this dataset, the largest or "Unlimited" tier of a given product line is consistently the cheapest per gigabyte — often by a factor of five or more over that same provider's entry-level package.
The advertised price tells you what you'll pay. Cost per GB tells you what you're actually buying.
Deep Dive Data covers Zimbabwe's telecoms, connectivity and cost-of-living data.