Not everyone can afford to sit in Shokola or Bourbon every day for hours and hours to soak up their free wifi and I’m pretty sure their staff are sick of seeing some of our faces day in, day out. Not mine, of course (although there was that one time I sat so long at Bourbon that I was asked to leave).
Setting up a wifi connection in your own house is a an option but it’s probably only practical if you plan to stick around awhile. Plus when the power goes out, so does your wifi connection which could become very frustrating in a city where power cuts are an issue.
USB modems are the alternative way of getting online when there’s no wifi signal floating through wherever you happen to be. They’re great because you can get online from virtually anywhere that gets a mobile phone connection. You’re no longer chained to places with wifi… internet freedom! Unlocked USB modems will work or if you haven’t got an unlocked on, you’ll need to buy a modem from whichever network you plan to use.
In Rwanda you have three options that match up with the three mobile phone carriers: MTN, Rwandatel, and Tigo. You buy the modem, a SIM card to go in the modem, have them set it all up for you and then pay either a monthly flat rate or pay for the data as you use it. Here’s a rundown of your three options.
MTN
Modem: Rwf 20,000 Sim Card: Rwf 1,000
5 MB: 150 50 MB: 1,500 250 MB: 6,000 500 MB: 10,000 1 G: 17,000 5 G: 30,000
MTN used to have a monthly plan that only cost Rwf 18,000 a month. That was discontinued while they update their network but some lucky people who got onto the plan before it was canceled are still able to wrangle that great price. Currently they only offer a pay-as-you-go plan that costs 17,000 for a gigabyte. My housemate is careful with his internet use (doesn’t download music or movies but Skypes occasionally) and he makes this last an entire month. If you are a heavy user and don’t want to worry too much about your usage then paying 30,000 for 5 gigabytes would probably suit most people for a month. The main problem is that the 5G expires after 30 days.
Rwandatel
Modem: Rwf 23,500 Sim Card: Rwf 1,000
Rwandatel offer a monthly payment plan but it’s super expensive at Rwf 41,300. It is nice not having to worry about the amount of data being used and this plan would be good for a heavy user who also plans on Skyping and downloading things. Might as well milk the unlimited plan for all it’s worth since you’re certainly paying a lot for it. I was on their monthly plan in July/August and it sucked badly. It would hardly ever connect and frustrated the hell out of me. But once my month was over I guess they didn’t turn it off so I milked my free magic internet for a bit longer to make up for the crap service in the first month. So beware that service might be crap but that you might also get magic internet if you can handle the frustration. They also offer data plans which star at 30 a megabyte.
Tigo
Modem: Rwf Sim Card: Rwf
500 MB: 10,000 2 G: 20,000 8 G: 40,000
Tigo offer three plans of various sizes and their prices are competitive. They also allow the balance to roll over to the next month if you don’t use all of the data you paid for. I guess the downside is having to commit to two months up front. I haven’t heard much about the quality of Tigo’s service so pipe up if you use them and let us all know what you think!
Something I’ve discovered with the MTN pay-as-you-go plan is that if you recharge your data bundle to the same as the previous recharge, any left over credit remains, even if you’ve passed the 30 days.
So, I top up to 30,000 and recharge to 5Gb. If I’ve left the country for a few weeks and gone past the 30 days, and still had 2Gb left over, I can recover it as long as I recharge to 5Gb again, to end up up with 7Gb total.
To be clear, if I recharge to 1Gb, anything left is gone.
I have the Tigo 8gb package and it is usually very good. Can be slow sometimes but I suppose that depends on how many people are using the network.
My SIM card is in the back of a router which supports about 10 computers. It’s handy because both my wife and I can access the internet at the same time through the same account
Hi Simon
Where did you pick up the router from? That sounds like the plan for shared houses / more than one computer per house.
Cheers
Hi I’m pondering a move to Kigali with my girlfriend who will be working for an NGO. My work would allow me to telecommute to my U.S. job, but it is of the utmost importance I have a fast reliable internet connection since I am a computer programmer. Are there areas of town that offer reliable wired internet connections? Or are these the only options? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hi. I arrived in Rwanda for a working holiday about 2 weeks ago, and MTN are now doing their monthly plan again, for (I think!!) 20,000. They also do a day plan and a week plan. However I think each month you have to buy airtime and then enter a code (*345*30) (or 7 or 1 depending whether you want a month, a week or a day!), It all seemed rather confusing, so I’ll probably be going back to the shop and asking them to show me again. But again, this is unlimited, so probably worth the hassle.
i just arrived in Kigali and got a MTN modem today. They’re 18,000 plus 1,000 for the SIM card. Now they have an offer where you pay 20,000 for the first month unlimited internet use. sweet deal i think!
Is there a way I could get a network connection on my blackberry?
I think USB modems are a thing of the past. Every decent Smartphone these days has a function called “Tethering” or “Internet-Passthrough”. So you book a data plan to your regular phone SIM, start tethering on your Smartphone, and your computer sees your Smartphone as a password-protected Wifi-Hotspot, or you connect them via USB cable.
Guys, at the moment there are two practicable ways to have internet (the original blogpost is “slightly” out of date):
MTN:
Get the 1-day internet subscription for 1000RWF (just dial *345*1#) – if you activate it at 00:01, it will last 47:59 hours, so this day and the day after. If you use it everyday you will end up paying 15000 instead of 21000 for the month-long subscription. No data volume limitation, by the way – and you can use the MTN hotspots all around the city too. Sometimes they work great (in my office I happen to have 250KB/s download speed) and sometimes you can’t even connect to them. In order to use them, send an SMS with your desired password to 345. Afterward you will be able to login with your MTN number and your password on wireless.mtn.co.rw/login, as soon as you are connected to their wifi.
tigo: Tigo now has one-day internet subscriptions, too. It costs 800 RWF and is activated by sending an SMS with the text “day” to 7050.
It mostly works much faster than with the MTN network (I had once 250 KB/s, nighttime though). Downside: the subscription ends on the same day at 0:00 and you have a volume limit of 2000MB.
Hope that was helpful to someone!
PS: You can also unlock your MTN modem in order to use it with the tigo SIM card – works just fine! (Try to google for “unlock [modem manufacturer, probably ZTE or Huawei][ modem model - should be found at the bottom of the dongle]) But pshhhht. Its a big secret!
By the way: Your wordpress software doesn’t let me use the proposed HTML tags below – If I do so, my comment is simply not posted…
At present which network is good at Kigali?