Big plans for a free Wi-Fi network in Pretoria

Hanno Labuschagne

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Big plans for a free Wi-Fi network in Pretoria

City of Tshwane plans to convert the transmission network for its free Wi-Fi service to fibre. However, theft and vandalism pose a significant threat to the service.

“There are 54 high sites established across the seven regions of the metro,” said Tshwane shared services head Musa Khumalo.

These high sites are situated on top of water reservoirs to enable better Internet connectivity to 1,576 Free Internet Zones (FIZs).
 
The question you always ask when our lovely government does something like this is. Who is profiting and why is other more important services not favored? But no wifi is important. Not the 1000s of other problems...... Viva Africa viva.
 
Why don't the CoT not invest in Elon Musk's Starlink, satellite internet without infrastructure that can be vandalized.
 
Why don't the CoT not invest in Elon Musk's Starlink, satellite internet without infrastructure that can be vandalized.
Not sure if you're joking or serious.

Starlink requires an expensive dish, you still need a router and how are you going to handle a login portal / fair use policy, also the large power requirement.

Then the other issue of bandwidth per satellite, you can have a few hundred per couple of square kilometer, it's fine for more rural, but definitely is too little if everyone in the city will use it.

The cheapest way to roll this out is probably partner with mobile providers and then set up wifi Hotspots that use the cellular towers for backhaul as point to point.

A better way would be to roll out fiber via micro trenching to run their own backhaul, but theft is an issue.
 
I have also noticed that all free WiFi nodes in the City of Pretoria are currently not working in the CBD. The situation is different in the affluent suburbs where they are all up and running yet there's fibre optic.
 
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