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Wireless Africa Programme Of The Meraka Institute
The Wireless Africa programme is a special initiative of the Meraka Institute managed by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, CSIR in South Africa. The Wireless Africa group is researching ways and means to develop sustainable information and communications technology in developing countries. This will be achieved through community-owned decentralized Mesh networking, mesh networks built on open source technology. Vision "Make a significant contribution to connecting 450 million people sustainably in rural Africa through wireless mesh and other technology with a community grown philosophy."{{Citation needed, date=March 2018 Core members Competency Area Manager: Kobus Roux Research Leader: David Johnson Implementation Project Manager: Karel Matthee Development Coordinator: Henk Kotze Partners Wireless Africa is partnering with Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN) in developing appropriate technologies to build affordable Community wireless net ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meraka Institute
South African wireless community networks are wireless networks that allow members to talk, send messages, share files and play games independent of the commercial landline and mobile telephone networks. Most of them use WiFi technology and many are wireless mesh networks. A wireless community network may connect to the public switched telephone network and/or the Internet, but there are various restrictions on connectivity in South Africa. Wireless community networks are particularly useful in areas where commercial telecommunications services are unavailable or unaffordable. Wireless User Groups (WUGs) in South African cities build up infrastructure and applications, as well as training members in wireless technology skills. Therefore, WUGs provide a fertile ground for new technology and applications that may have large social benefits in informal communities and rural areas of South Africa and neighboring countries. Background: South African Telecommunications Environment Sou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Council For Scientific And Industrial Research
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is South Africa's central and premier scientific research and development organisation. It was established by an act of parliament in 1945 and is situated on its own campus in the city of Pretoria. It is the largest research and development (R&D) organisation in Africa and accounts for about 10% of the entire African R&D budget. It has a staff of approximately 3,000 technical and scientific researchers, often working in multi-disciplinary teams. CSIR contract research and development Overview The CSIR contract R&D portfolio aims to enable clear understanding of national imperatives and the needs of industry to optimise the impact of the CSIR's R&D outputs. It leverages public, private and international partnerships in support of cutting-edge science, engineering and technology (SET).The organisation has clients in both the private sector (micro, small, medium and large enterprises; formal and informal), as well as in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe; and to the east and northeast by Mozambique and Eswatini. It also completely enclaves the country Lesotho. It is the southernmost country on the mainland of the Old World, and the second-most populous country located entirely south of the equator, after Tanzania. South Africa is a biodiversity hotspot, with unique biomes, plant and animal life. With over 60 million people, the country is the world's 24th-most populous nation and covers an area of . South Africa has three capital cities, with the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government based in Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Cape Town respectively. The largest city is Johannesburg. About 80% of the population are Black South Afri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Information And Communications Technology
Information and communications technology (ICT) is an extensional term for information technology (IT) that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications (telephone lines and wireless signals) and computers, as well as necessary enterprise software, middleware, storage and audiovisual, that enable users to access, store, transmit, understand and manipulate information. ICT is also used to refer to the convergence of audiovisuals and telephone networks with computer networks through a single cabling or link system. There are large economic incentives to merge the telephone networks with the computer network system using a single unified system of cabling, signal distribution, and management. ICT is an umbrella term that includes any communication device, encompassing radio, television, cell phones, computer and network hardware, satellite systems and so on, as well as the various services and appliances with them such as video conferencing and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mesh Networking
A mesh network is a local area network topology in which the infrastructure nodes (i.e. bridges, switches, and other infrastructure devices) connect directly, dynamically and non-hierarchically to as many other nodes as possible and cooperate with one another to efficiently route data to and from clients. This lack of dependency on one node allows for every node to participate in the relay of information. Mesh networks dynamically self-organize and self-configure, which can reduce installation overhead. The ability to self-configure enables dynamic distribution of workloads, particularly in the event a few nodes should fail. This in turn contributes to fault-tolerance and reduced maintenance costs. Mesh topology may be contrasted with conventional star/tree local network topologies in which the bridges/switches are directly linked to only a small subset of other bridges/switches, and the links between these infrastructure neighbours are hierarchical. While star-and-tree topologi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open Source Technology
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery. Open source promotes universal access via an open-source or free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint. Before the phrase ''open source'' became widely adopted, developers and producers have used a variety of other terms. ''Open source'' gained h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network
The Independent Media Center, better known as Indymedia, is an open publishing network of activist journalist collectives that report on political and social issues. Following beginnings during the 1999 Carnival Against Capital and 1999 Seattle WTO protests, Indymedia became closely associated with the global justice movement. The Indymedia network extended internationally in the early 2000s with volunteer-run centers that shared software and a common format with a newswire and columns. Police raided several centers and seized computer equipment. The centers declined in the 2010s with the waning of the global justice movement. Content and distribution Indymedia is a website for citizen journalism that promotes activism and counters mainstream media news and commentary perspectives. Indymedia originated from protests against the concentrated ownership and perceived biases in corporate media reporting. The first Indymedia node, attached to the Seattle anti-corporate global ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Community Wireless Network
Wireless community networks (WCNs) or wireless community projects or simply community networks, are non-centralized, self-managed and collaborative networks organized in a grassroots fashion by communities, NGO's and cooperatives in order to provide a viable alternative to municipal wireless networks for consumers. Many of these organizations set up wireless mesh networks which rely primarily on sharing of unmetered residential and business DSL and cable Internet. This sort of usage might be non-compliant with the terms of service of local internet service provider (ISPs) that deliver their service via the consumer phone and cable duopoly. Wireless community networks sometimes advocate complete freedom from censorship, and this position may be at odds with the acceptable use policies of some commercial services used. Some ISPs do allow sharing or reselling of bandwidth. The First Latin American Summit of Community Networks, held in Argentina in 2018, presented the following d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Meraka Institute
South African wireless community networks are wireless networks that allow members to talk, send messages, share files and play games independent of the commercial landline and mobile telephone networks. Most of them use WiFi technology and many are wireless mesh networks. A wireless community network may connect to the public switched telephone network and/or the Internet, but there are various restrictions on connectivity in South Africa. Wireless community networks are particularly useful in areas where commercial telecommunications services are unavailable or unaffordable. Wireless User Groups (WUGs) in South African cities build up infrastructure and applications, as well as training members in wireless technology skills. Therefore, WUGs provide a fertile ground for new technology and applications that may have large social benefits in informal communities and rural areas of South Africa and neighboring countries. Background: South African Telecommunications Environment ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
