Stellenbosch To Become SA’s First Town With Free Wi-Fi Everywhere
Welcome to the future, kids. Stellenbosch is about to become the first town in Africa to offer fast and free Wi-Fi accross the entire town. The project is a collaboration between the municipality, Mxit and the University of Stellenbosch. It’s even stretching into the suburbs and neighbouring towns. Très cool.
They’re not standing still either – the trial network, which will cover the town centre, is ready to go live on Friday! The network will then be rolled out to all populated areas within the Stellenbosch municipality. This includes areas over the Helshoogte pass, such as Franschhoek and Pniel. What this essentially means is that if you’re sitting at home, and you don’t have ADSL access, you should be able to pick up Stellenbosch Wi-Fi from your desk.
The service will be offered free of charge, and no regisration will be required. Large downloads will be prohibited, and each user will only receive 500MB of data a day at a speed of 1 mbps. Still, that is pretty damn mental.
All that needs to be done now is to install repeaters closer to residents to “fill in” the network and boost coverage. These repeaters will be placed on lamp poles and on other suitably high sites.
This is all made possible through a collaboration between Stellenbosch University and Mxit, who have agreed to share some of their bandwidth with the project. The university currently has a 1GBps connection and Mxit has stated that unused bandwith will be given to the project.
It is hoped that this project will attract technical entrepreneurs to the area, which is fast becoming one of South Africa’s tech hubs. This begs the question – when is this going to happen in the mother city?
[Source: MyBroadband]
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9 Comments
Mike
22 Feb 2012
This should so happen in all cities, everywhere. Would be rad if free wi-fi everywhere is part of what tax goes towards. Heck, even give me free wi-fi if I have to view an advertisement every 30 minutes or something.
Madi
22 Feb 2012
Awesome! Let City Bowl be next!
madre
22 Feb 2012
Wow…amazing!
Ntuthuko
22 Feb 2012
Cape Town is alright , but the most silent City when it comes to Technology is Durban , what’s happening people??
JustCallMe_k
22 Feb 2012
A reason to move to Stellies….
J
22 Feb 2012
Thankful, Let’s do this! Says the local
Jason
22 Feb 2012
Woodstock is next!
Loyiso
23 Feb 2012
We’re working on a project together with Internet Solutions that will give free internet to the entire country. We’er hoping for a roll out in June. Watch this space.
steve
23 Feb 2012
sheesh, the university are going to lose a packet. They use to charge us per mB, even for academic use.
but this is so the way forward. terrace pizza now comes with free porn
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