Hi! I use Smile because it's a little faster and significantly more reliable than the others. Most of my business and personal communication abroad happens via video Skype. Voda and Airtel are sometimes fast enough, but often aren't especially during peak times. I hate having to tell clients that my connection isn't good enough for a scheduled call.
For an idea of what I'm talking about, here's 70 second pings to google.com from an especially frustrating morning in January on Vodacom TZ: http://i.imgur.com/5urJcd7.png. This isn't typical but happens often enough to be a problem.
With Smile I'm paying rates comparable to 4G service in the US, e.g. TMobile[1]. The service isn't nearly as fast (peak I've seen is ~3.5 Megabytes/sec download) but the reliability makes it worth it. I suspect I'm paying as much for lower contention ratios on the towers as for "4G" infrastructure, but the end result is the same.
How fast is it? To my NZ ears these prices sound fantastic, as we usually pay about 5-6 times that for unlimited internet (if unlimited is even an option; it only is in certain urban areas). But presumably it's quite slow?
Neat. My rough understanding is that carriers here route traffic through SEACOM, EASSy (and likely others) to minimize cost and traffic. I don't think I can choose SEACOM specifically -- but I'm always up to test Cunningham's Law.
Your traffic traversed through SMILE>Zantel>Tata .. You may not be able to influence the best path to reach Google through Smile even though Zantel might be multihomed (unless the best path changes). I'd recommend testing from other providers such as SPICE-NET-TZ, TZ or simbanet-tz,TZ etc. [ Look above at the Seacom's downstream adjacent AS link I provided to find if you can use any of those carrier instead ]
# whois -h whois.cymru.com 41.138.222.196
AS | IP | AS Name
327692 | 41.138.222.196 | SMILECOMMS,UG
# whois -h whois.cymru.com 41.73.194.97
AS | IP | AS Name
36930 | 41.73.194.97 | Zantel-AS,TZ
