What we do in this area:

“The cost of bandwidth in Africa poses a barrier to the continent’s effective participation in international trade and the knowledge economy, while limiting local markets and education. Without adequate bandwidth Africa runs the risk of being left behind in the global race. The Shuttleworth Foundation is, therefore, actively investing in a project portfolio that will contribute towards solving bandwidth limitations in the African context.”

This month’s highlights:

We are developing 3 strategies within telecommunications.

1) The Democratisation of the Telecommunication Infrastructure. Trying to understand better how people can do it for themselves. One of the most promising opportunities in this area is the “village telco” model. Essentially “an easy-to-use connectivity solution that provides extensible local telephony with the possibility of upstream voice and/or data connectivity via POTS, mobile, or other IP services.” We have met with dabba.co.za and explored township locations of this pilot and are exploring how entrepreneurs would be able to support and run with this model.

There are parallels between this project and one in India. Dr. Mike Best from Georgia Tech is sending us the results to see if we can improve the experiment here.

2) Cities as hubs of innovation. Cities have a large role to play in developing this infrastructure and can really help to drive innovation. We are currently investigating municipal fibre strategies and the broader role of fibre such as Seacom.

3) Telecommunications policy. It is vital that policy allows the innovations we are trying to drive. We are working with Alison Gilwald from the LINK centre to deliver a paper on what policy needs to look like to get the most benefit for the citizens of South Africa. What are the points and leverage and what must we do?

Steve Song (Telecommunication Fellow) has blog postings at :

African Undersea Cables – Map
Community Pricing for on-demand publishing
Seacom Sets Date, Reveals Pricing
Yabba Dabba Do