Free Wi-Fi in South Africa growing

The biggest issue with this becoming more common is someone to pay for the bandwidth. Stellenbosch is in a very fortunate position where they have Mxit, a corporate sponsor, who is willing to donate their excess bandwidth. It's a unique situation. If government/Telkom were to start sponsoring bandwidth though, who knows?

and also, iirc, it is 500MB per day.
 
500Meg isnt that bad, if I was in the Stellenbosch area I would have it permanently connected to my android, and stop paying vodacom the insane amount they ask for bandwidth, all and all not bad.

PS I would also recommend any one wanting to use the service to use a encrypted vpn, these services arent very secure, hell if you use any form of wifi hotspot,please encrypt your connection.
 
How can you complain about technological leaps forward like this. And FFS stop moaning about what government is doing to give you free stuff. Any government anywhere had difficulty providing basic necessities to many of it's citizens/dependents. Thank you to corporate and individual sponsorships attempting to provide good quality, an even free, services.
 
500 Mb a day is awesome ! You can do just about anything except download big files. I am sure the gamers will be happy (thats if they allowed to use it but I cannot see why not). This is just about the most awesome news I heard all year re bandwidth !!
 
Garyvdh said:
500 MB cap :sick:

I hope that at least renews every month.
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Seriously:wtf:

latro said:
Iirc it was 500mb per day and even if not, it's still free..
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Jakes147 said:
Thats 15GB /month, not to shabby.
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Bloody awesome I think:) It is very lucky that Stellenbosch has a few big companies (specifically some big IT companies) that can assist, but there is no reason any other municipality can't do the same thing - it will just cost them a little more, but if they are clever they could do the following:

Have an on-net information service including municipal info, learning material, a proxy cache for wikipedia and much more - therefore useful info is all local bandwidth.
Put in some shaping and restrictions to protect the bandwidth
Use what is available to provide connectivity - at each municipal building get a second ADSL line to plug in to the wifi for backhaul and make sure the network can route efficiently to the least congested backhaul link (little bit of design).
See if some businesses will sponsor some after hours internet access for the network.
Make sure if covers poor areas and access national government funding to help out.
 
Municipal free wifi is a truly awesome development which can really change the game in SA. Let's hope it succeeds and spreads. I am sure there are plenty of corporates who could link advertising to provisioning of bandwidth.

I have used some awful free-wifi in my time - so slow you have to refresh basic web pages when their downloads stall, and transactions become a nightmare when they time out after a page of form-filling. Let's hope we never get to this poor experience level.
 
500Meg isnt that bad, if I was in the Stellenbosch area I would have it permanently connected to my android, and stop paying vodacom the insane amount they ask for bandwidth, all and all not bad.
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which is exactly what I plan on doing. It's gonna be awesome!

What is a "small time town"? Is it a small town intermittently and bigger the rest of the time?
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Funny guy :D
 
entrepr said:
I have used some awful free-wifi in my time - so slow you have to refresh basic web pages when their downloads stall, and transactions become a nightmare when they time out after a page of form-filling. Let's hope we never get to this poor experience level.
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Lets hope that's all in the past !! Certainly with all the new cables coming in it will be shortly if not already :)
 
East London is laying fibre optic cables all over the place, anyone know the story behind this?
 
Once again we attempt what the rest of the world already tried:
  1. Free wifi - a dream deferred
  2. why municipal wifi systems failed
  3. Epidemic of Municipal wifi failures
  4. The myth of municipal wifi networks

I condede that these links are oldish, 2 from 2007 and the last link is published in 2005, maybe the game has changed.

One of the conculsions reached in that last one is interesting: "The municipal ownership model is still flawed":
I think thats the whole problem with these free networks, someone has to own them and maintain them. Maybe you can trust your municipality with that, but ours cant keep the sewerage off the streets.

Next on the agenda, Nationalisation of the mines... its a failure everywhere else, but we have to try it.
 
If local officials want to become broadband entrepreneurs, they should resign their elected offices
and start a network company. Then they can assume the financial risks themselves with voluntary
investors, rather than playing at broadband with taxpayers as their underwriters.
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http://newmillenniumresearch.org/archive/wifireport2305.pdf

What was true in 2005 is still true in 2012
 
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