Sharing is caring
It’s a notoriously famous South African pastime: People huddling around the braai lamenting the crime, poor service delivery and the dire state of South Africa’s broadband penetration levels (the digital divide).
Perhaps the energy we collectively invest in complaining about things could be better spent on seeking solutions, don’t you think?
As far as the digital divide and internet access for all are concerned, perhaps we could learn something from that much repeated African term “ubuntu”. Ubuntu is a fi ne concept which speaks to the oneness of people; the commonality that unites us as human beings.
Ironically, while the ubuntu concept was birthed in the cultural richness of Africa, its meaning is lost amid the wars, human suffering, disease and famine in which the continent seems to be so intractably ensnared. (Call me Afropessimistic if you like; I call it Afro-realism).
Do not despair, though, my agitating technological revolutionary comrades. Change is at hand. With our Wi-Fi routers and our tech savviness, we will set this continent free from the tyranny of unjust telecommunications pricing (at the very least) and open up the equivalent of technological soup kitchens to feed the internet-starved masses. (The next few paragraphs are so radical in their potential that I anticipate incurring the wrath of every ISP and telecommunications operator.)
The solution is a simple thing called “connection sharing”. It is something that stands to greatly reduce costs while significantly increasing the reach of internet access – beyond our experts’ most liberal forecasts, I’d wager.
Until recently, connection sharing was a blasphemous notion. We had paltry bandwidth speeds (remember 192K ADSL?) and miserly data caps of 3GB with pricing per gig amounting to a small fortune, so it stood to reason that ADSL connections were scarce and jealously guarded by their “owners”.
The landscape has changed recently and the stage is set for a new revolution that will undoubtedly punish the morbidly obese telecommunications operators who have fleeced and extorted revenues from the South African public for far too long. With an uncapped ADSL connection costing as little as R1,100 per month nowadays and offering speeds of 1MB/s and upwards, connection sharing makes perfect sense.
Imagine, if you will, a complex with eight units. Joe Blogs, the generous neighbour with the 4MB/s uncapped ADSL connection, would like to share the cost of the ADSL connection with the other residents (hotspot style) to ensure that they can all get online while sharing the cost. Using Wi-Fi to create a hotspot-like network, that single ADSL connection can now be accessed by any unit that has a Wi-Fi enabled PC within range.
Previously, one would have needed a PhD in obscure computer sciences to configure the Wi-Fi network necessary to share that single ADSL connection. Not any more.
Recent advances in ultralow- cost Wi-Fi mesh networks have meant that a single ADSL connection can be shared across complexes, buildings and neighbourhoods without any technical knowledge and within minutes. Mesh networks are Wi-Fi networks on steroids.
They allow for intelligent routing of traffic and can amplify a Wi-Fi signal to ensure greater network coverage. They’ve become so easy to use and to set up of late that you could have your entire complex set up with blanket Wi-Fi coverage in a matter of hours. Imagine now, thousands of these consumer-owned Wi-Fi hotspots cropping up wherever there is an uncapped ADSL connection, creating massive Wi-Fi clouds that provide access far and wide?
The digital divide is on the verge of being bridged.
Wi-Fi mesh network discussion
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