Providing free WiFi to a small community

[lkpat]

What are the issues / legalities with doing the above?
For context, I live in a small village where Vodacom has one tower which goes down 3 hours after a power outage. We have another provider who shall not be named who provides a wireless service with max speeds of 8Mbps - they usually stay up after power outages for some hours.
Occasionally we have up to a week of no Eskom and of course no comms, which makes living out here unsafe for people who need emergency services. What we want to do is set up our own point which would act as a 'civic center' and allow access for emergencies over Satellite services during times of outage and allow phone calls and whatsapp or whatever to the village residents when we're in extended load shedding.

What do we need to do to provide something like this? Is it necessary to register as an ISP? What products are we then limited to on the ISP side (e.g. if we go satellite) - assume consumer products are out?

 

[DapperDanMan]

What do we need to do to provide something like this?

Check out the most recent posts by @PretoriaWISP.

 

[TheSlinger]

The way I see it you have two paths here:

1) Provide access at the civic center. Residents need to go there and connect to the wifi and then do their business.

I don't think you need any ISP related registrations or anything like that here - think of like a coffee shop with wifi available for customers.
Perhaps a sign on screen or something so users agree to a basic aup etc. I know this is possible through something like ubiquity hardware.

2) Line of sight from the Civic center to each residents house.
Here you're basically acting as an ISP, so would probably have more requirements in that regard, and a larger equipment cost as you need to broadcast your internet out.

I would go for 1, simpler, easier.

 

[William1102]

Could do a Point to multi point from the civic center and broadcast the network in a part of the town

 

[PretoriaWISP]

What are the issues / legalities with doing the above?
For context, I live in a small village where Vodacom has one tower which goes down 3 hours after a power outage. We have another provider who shall not be named who provides a wireless service with max speeds of 8Mbps - they usually stay up after power outages for some hours.
Occasionally we have up to a week of no Eskom and of course no comms, which makes living out here unsafe for people who need emergency services. What we want to do is set up our own point which would act as a 'civic center' and allow access for emergencies over Satellite services during times of outage and allow phone calls and whatsapp or whatever to the village residents when we're in extended load shedding.

What do we need to do to provide something like this? Is it necessary to register as an ISP? What products are we then limited to on the ISP side (e.g. if we go satellite) - assume consumer products are out?

Old post, sorry, We can assist with this. Though I do warn you it's a bit of a nightmare. Depending on the location you'd need an ECSN & ECS license but one could apply for an exempt one I'd contact Ellipsis for assistance on a legal point.
Otherwise I would definitely do this like at a coffee shop or something to overcome some obstacles.