A workshop on Community Wireless: Models, Content and Infrastructure was organised by NET4D members at ICTD17 in Lahore, Pakistan.
A full day workshop was held on 16 November with 7 presentations from 6 countries: Pakistan, India, Philippines, Thailand, USA and South Africa.
Welcome to the website for the Net4D group, part of the University of Cape Town Centre in ICT4D. This is a joint collaboration with NGOs in Masiphumulele and Ocean View, CSIR Meraka, and UCT.
The Inethi project had its first public event in May, at Ocean View High School.
The day started with an informal session, as people were trickling into the computer lab. Marius Waries, the after-school supervisor, encouraged learners to explore content available on the Wifi such as games and the WikiFundi platform, which has an offline-editable Wikipedia environment as well as related resources. The learners used both their own devices and the tablets housed in the lab.
The net4d research group focuses on low-cost networking solutions for developing regions including rural and peri-urban areas (such as townships). These networking solutions are typically used by small ISPs or community networks and provide alternatives to costly cellular, satellite or fixed line technology that is simple to install, does not require large up front investments for exclusive spectrum licenses and makes optimal use of the local network providing low latency, high speed services to locally cached content.
