The City of Tshwane has the best model for that. “By 2020 we will have free WiFi everywhere. It also ties in rather nicely with Knott-Craig Jnr’s predictionsduring a SATNAC panel discussion that free WiFi will be provided by municipalities (instead of companies) by 2020. If the government can turn old payphones into WiFi hotspots across the country, it wouldn’t be the first initiative the country has seen aimed at providing public access to the internet. It’s similar in a way to Project Isizwe, founded by Alan Knott-Craig Jnr, which provides large areas of the City of Tshwane will free WiFi access. “The key here is to make those connections an open-access base, because a payphones is open access.” However, although the possibility of turning payphones into WiFi networks is still just an idea at this stage, Padayachee said they face a few issues should the initiative become a reality, there is an important issue. In return, you can connect to any other FON network, either locally or internationally. If you are a MWEB customer with a Fon-enabled router, you share a part of your WiFi bandwidth to be accessed by others. Last year MWEB signed a deal with FON, one of the largest WiFi networks in the world. “We would want to expand to where the infrastructure is, and a great example of this is MWEB’s FON network,” Padayachee said. It might sound simple enough, but as South Africa is still very much underdeveloped in rural areas (and even some urban areas) it could be a costly exercise. “If you use payphones, we would be able to put WiFi in there, and ideally we would like to put it in as many payphones across the country.” “We would make use of the assets (like the payphones) to do that, so that we don’t have any additional costs,” he said during the annual SATNAC conference. LinkNYC, as it was named, would reportedly cost the city about $200 million and provide unlimited 1 Gigabit access at each of its WiFi hotspots.Ī similar initiative could be started in South Africa through Telkom, according to Prenesh Padayachee, Telkom’s Managing Director for Wholesale Services. Late last year, the City of New York announced plans to turn old public payphones into WiFi hotspots across the city. Charlie Fripp of HTXT.Africa writes more about such plans. ![]() It seems they might become wifi hotspots too. Superman always puts payphone booths to good use.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |