Harare — ECONET Wireless Zimbabwe, the country's largest mobile phone operator, will soon introduce roaming services for its Buddie and Libertie prepaid service subscribers.

The subscribers of the two services will soon be able to take their phones with them to other countries and use the same Econet sim cards or subscriber numbers in those countries. The service, which until now has only been available for customers with contract lines, is generally known as roaming. Prepaid roaming is much more difficult for operators to implement because it uses real time billing, unlike a contract service.

Econet said it has been working for more than six months to implement prepaid roaming, and has invested heavily in the service, which is expected to have huge positive impact on prepaid services.

Millions of people in the country use prepaid services, and the ability to travel with the phone to other countries, while still using the same number would be convenience of the highest standard.

Econet Wireless chief executive Mr Douglas Mboweni confirmed the development adding that work to introduce the roaming service was now at an advanced stage and the company was targeting launching the service by Christmas this year.

"We have already installed much of the system, and we should begin testing it early December," he said.

Once the system is fully operational, Econet Wireless will then connect it to networks in neighbouring countries as well as to Europe.

The prepaid roaming service will work both ways, which means that people in South Africa or Zambia with prepaid lines can also roam in Zimbabwe.

Econet expects multitudes of Zimbabweans from neigbouring countries like South Africa to roam in Zimbabwe when they come for holidays.

This means that a network must not only have the capacity to roam, but it must have capacity to cope with the visitors on its network.

Econet has a lot of excess capacity on its network following its recent multi-million dollar network expansion programme.

Econet has also indicated that it is working on integrating its prepaid billing systems, such that Buddie and Libertie customers can use the same recharge cards.

Explaining this development, Mr Mboweni said: "Although Libertie and Buddie customers use the same network when making calls, they have separate billing systems, and so have separate recharge cards.

"We have now started a project to integrate them into one, which means that in future there will only be one recharge card. This will make it more convenient for our customers."