Extending coverage into Swazi with repeaters?

[ndoc]

Hi Everyone,

As you may or may not know - your fiends across the border have very little option when it comes to accessing the internet. ADSL and leased lines are bad to non-existant and MTN Swaziland still does not offer mobile internet.

I have been tasked with looking at the IT infrastructure for a small rural town/community on the border between SA and Swazi for a charitable organisation. The closest town on the SA side is Barberton and is as the crow flies about 22km away.

We currently use a satellite connection and while fairly reliable it is very costly and has limited bandwidth available for our growing services and people in the community.

An option I was considering was boosting the signal across the border using a repeater of some sort (eg http://www.xpandacell.com/) and then aggregating bandwidth and load balancing a few plans on a multi wan broadband router (eg http://www.xincom.com/products/xseries/x16-r/) - for argument sakes I can get about 8x 5GB plans for the same cost per month.

I guess I am just throwing this out there to see what your response to this is: Is it a good/bad idea? Are there other options? Are there local providers of repeaters that work with the cellular providers in SA? Can you even aggregate these plans? Is this legal or do I need to get this approved by anyone?

All your thoughts and recommendations will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

 

[morkhans]

I think 22km might be a bit of a stretch for 3G signal? I am not sure how well those repeaters will deal with 3G data? Have you considered setting up a Wifi link to Barberton and then seeing if you can source a internet connection at the high site in SA? If you can get ADSL instead it could work out a much better deal.