Sadly, the progress of this project, as well as the high expectations that many people seem to have had of it, highlight some of the realities of telecoms services that seem often to be misunderstood, most notably by idealists and politicians in South Africa.
On the face of it, other than utopian fantasy, there is no reason to believe that a project to deliver free services, jointly funded by a declining, loss-making company and a somewhat naive local municipality, based on the assumption that telecoms infrastructure is exceptionally cheap to deploy and simple to maintain, would ever succeed. This is no Google in Kansas City - in that case, it's clear to see where the money and project management is coming from.
Free WiFi (i.e. some hubs) would be a great idea, and may even have worked, if it weren't for the fact that that is not what is being deployed. What is being deployed is free global Internet connectivity, with free backhaul links to lampposts, and free support and maintenance - there's nothing free about this at all, it's just subsidised. It's also not a community effort, with everyone paying for their bit, like a WUG, and even if it were a WUG, it still wouldn't actually be offering free global Internet connectivity.
Whether you like it or not, the elements that have driven the massive growth of telecoms - sound, profitable business models, and competition - are entirely absent from this project. You might as well suggest that everyone get free utility services from the municipality - who is actually paying for this in the long term, when mxit realises that it's just another hole in their increasingly leaky bucket?
That's not to say that disruptive approaches, especially lower cost approaches, cannot work. It's just that they need to make some business sense, or they are doomed to failure.
