Located in the rural remote community of
Mankosi in the Eastern Cape, a solar powered wireless community network was
developed with the help of the research team at the University of Western Cape.
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| The community of Mankosi, in the Eastern Cape, is working together to empower one another. Source: DGMT Community Portal |
It is no secret that South Africa has some of the highest mobile voice and data costs in the world. The two came together and create a network that would ease financial strain on the community.
The Zenzeleni Networks project – Zenzeleni
means “do it yourself” in isiXhosa,– is, as far as the team is aware, South
Africa’s first and only Internet Service Provider (ISP) that’s owned and run by
a rural cooperative. Just like any ISP, Zenzeleni installs and maintains
telecommunications infrastructure and also sells telecommunications services
like voice and data.
The Mankosi project was launched in 2012
and legally registered in 2014. To establish the Zenzeleni network Associate
Professor of Computer Science, Bill Tucker, and his team approached local
leaders to help get the community on board and we provided help and mentorship.
Ultimately the residents run the project themselves.
With the local authority’s permission, a
cooperative comprising ten local and respected people was formed. This group
designed the network layout, and built and installed a dozen solar powered mesh
network nodes or stations. These are mounted on and inside houses around
Mankosi. These are organised in what we call a mesh network and WiFi stations
cover an area of 30 square kilometres.
Zenzeleni constitutes a fully fledged
Internet Service Provider, equipped with an Internet and Voice-over Internet
Protocol gateway, community managers and a billing system in isiXhosa.
Watch the video below to see how it all began.
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA), which grants licences to ISPs and collects fees where
necessary, granted Zenzeleni a licence exemption; so it costs Zenzeleni nothing
in fees to operate infrastructure and sell services. The community only has to
pay for the backhaul Internet connectivity, which they can get at wholesale
prices from companies like EastTel and OpenServe,
and for educational use from TENET.
Zenzeleni’s voice calls and data costs
are much cheaper than what’s offered by the big mobile operators. For example
voice calls can cost 20c a minute rather than the standard R1.50 or more while
data costs can be between 20 and 40 times cheaper.
The solar powered stations also charge
cell phone batteries for R3.50 instead of the R5 usually charged by spaza shops
or shebeens. Those shops tend to be some distance from the village, so people
save time as well as money.
It
doesn’t end there…
Community is at the heart of Zenzeleni’s
model. All revenues stay in the community: each cooperative has a bank account,
and all residents get together to decide what to do with the money that’s been
paid for Zenzeleni services.
For example, the Mankosi cooperative has
provided micro-loans to residents for starting small businesses.
No one is currently earning a salary from
the community network. But when usage grows, as we expect it will do with super
cheap data, revenues are likely to grow so much that the cooperative will want
to install more nodes and hire people to actively maintain them making the
network more resilient. Since March 2014, the project has earned around R33 600.
Source: The Conversation
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