Over in East Africa, MTN Rwanda has gave birth to its first BlackBerry services in the market, targeting 1,000 medium and high value customers this year.  Launched a week ago, the BlackBerry solution will operate on MTN Rwanda’s Global Systems for Mobile communications /General Packet Radio Service (GSM/GPRS) network throughout the country.

Yvonne Manzi Makolo who is the senior sales manager over at MTN Rwanda,  said “the government and a lot of companies will find value in BlackBerry given that MTN Rwanda has GSM/GPRS network throughout the country, which enables easy access to its mobile internet.” The company claims close to 4,000 subscribers on its mobile internet connection.

She talked about how the company was in the process of working on data roaming agreements with other major companies such as Vodafone, MTN Uganda and South Africa, BTL, Rogers, Safaricom and operators in Dubai, the US and Belgium to allow its customers access to BlackBerry while in those countries.

The company currently has two BlackBerry Smartphones starting with the famous BlackBerry Bold with 3G that costs Rwf430,000 (US$773) and BlackBerry Curve 8320 that costs Rwf300,000 (US$539).

A monthly service fee of Rwf30,000 (US$53.9) including Value Added Tax (VAT) has also been introduced.

We continue seeing the BlackBerry service spreading worldwide.  In the past few weeks we had average of 1-2 companies per week just gaining BlackBerry attributes in their regions.

Source: allAfrica.com

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