By Jackson Oboth
A very beautiful story was told to delegates at the recently concluded Highway Africa Conference at Rhodes University in South Africa. It was a story of how city authorities developed an initiative to provide free WiFi to communities in an effort to promote social inclusion. In the end, cohesion was built, and community development sky rocketed.
The story was told during a panel discussion: “Narratives of the city in journalism and the media”; involving the Mayors of Tshwane, Mr Kgosientso Ramokgopa, and the Executive Mayor of the city of Johannesburg Mr Parks Tau and Professor Steven Friedman of the University of Johannesburg.
Mr Kgosientso Ramokgopa said the City of Tshwane recently upgraded the maximum speeds on its Free WiFi network to 15mbps. To date the average speed for users has been 7mbps. The network has grown to 633 sites over the past 18 months, resulting in economies of scale that can be passed to citizens in the form of faster WiFi speeds without any additional cost to the City.
“The provision of free access to the Internet promotes social inclusion, stimulates growth, and supports learning through the accessibility of digital education material,” said Mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa. “For example, citizens are now able to tele-commute and study after-hours near their places of residence, as opposed to having to find transport to traditional places of study. The economic benefits of free WiFi are the result of improved market efficiencies due to the reduction of information asymmetries.”
According to the Mayor, the Tshwane Free WiFi service has enabled over 720,000 unique users to get online since it launched in November 2013, logging over 22m sessions. So far, 2015 has seen average monthly unique users of 165,000 per month. They have benefitted from access to online information for education, economic opportunity and social cohesion.
In an exclusive interview with Mr Jeremy Potgieter MTN Group Manager M2M Group Enterprise Business Unit, MTN has been right in the centre of the creation of super highway of connectivity to enable inspired growth in many markets.
Mr Potgieter said MTN will continue to partner with key stakeholders and encourage them to leverage on its wide footprints to grow their businesses.
“In different markets, MTN continues to cement its position, with provision of strong Wi-Fi service for inspired community growth,” he said.
In line with Mr. Potgieter’s remarks, MTN Uganda recently launched countrywide 4G coverage in Uganda, extending the latest broadband technology to all major towns. This latest investment for the first time now takes the MTN 4G experience beyond Kampala, across all corners of Uganda, to enable high speed internet access for its customers.
Over the years, MTN has made major investments to its data infrastructure in Uganda and greatly enhanced the radio capacity and infrastructure technology. Furthermore, it extended the fibre network backbone and built regional switching centres in the East, West, North and Central regions.
Mr. Potgieter is optimistic that MTN Uganda’s investment in expansion of its national fibre network with additional rings to protect customer services and provide direct fibre connection to MTN Rwanda will continue to provide the capacity for high speed data connectivity and wider national coverage of 4G mobile data services and extend Internet access to the rural areas of the country.
