- Title
- Community ‘Broadband Islands’ for digital government access in rural South Africa
- Creator
- Terzoli, Alfredo, Siebörger, Ingrid, Gumbo, Sibukelo
- Subject
- To be catalogued
- Date
- 2017
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/431248
- Identifier
- vital:72758
- Identifier
- https://www.academic-bookshop.com/ourshop/prod_6128029-ECDG-2017-PDF-Proceedings-of-the-17th-European-Conference-on-Digital-Government.html
- Description
- In the developing world, one of the main obstacles to the realization of the potential of digital government in rendering services to citizens is the lack of access infrastructure. In this paper we present a model for the diffusion of Internet connectivity and access to computing infrastructure in rural communities in South Africa, through the aggregation of inde-pendent small and micro networks. The model is based on multi-year experimentation in the Siyakhula Living Lab, a long term joint venture between the Telkom Centres of Excellence hosted at Rhodes Universi-ty and the University of Fort Hare in South Africa. At the core of the model is the concept of ‘Broadband Island’, a high speed LAN realized through easy-to-deploy wireless technologies connecting groups of nearby schools. Each connected school, doubling as Digital Access Nodes for the community, hosts computing infrastructure in a serv-ers/thin clients configuration. Two schools belonging to the Broadband Island are then connected to the Internet with whatever technique makes sense within that specific geographical area: VSAT, microwave link, fibre etc. Each Broadband Island can be provisioned and support-ed by a variety of independent entities (such as Municipalities, Educa-tion Districts, NGOs, local action groups etc), possibly combined in con-sortia and in some cases using a Public Private Partnership format.
- Format
- 5 pages, pdf
- Language
- English
- Relation
- The Proceedings of 17th European Conference on Digital Government ECDG, Terzoli, A., Siebörger, I. and Gumbo, S., 2017, June. Community ‘Broadband Islands’ for digital government access in rural South Africa. In The Proceedings of 17th European Conference on Digital Government ECDG 2017 (p. 204), The Proceedings of 17th European Conference on Digital Government ECDG volume 2017 number 1 1 5 2017 9781911218371
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited Statement (https://www.academic-bookshop.com/)
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Collections
Terzoli, Alfredo (Prof)
Sieborger, Ingrid (Dr)
RU Department of Information Systems
RU Department of Computer Science
SDG 09. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | Community ‘Broadband Islands’ for digital government access in rural South Africa.pdf | 658 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |