The worldwide debate about zero rating and network neutrality has brought the issue of affordable Internet access into sharp relief. I recently came back from the Internet Governance Forum
Browsing: Village Telco
The Africa Coast to Europe (Ace) submarine cable could be among the last major international broadband systems to land on South African shores for some time, says an expert. The Ace cable
The University of the Western Cape has introduced a new model for Village Telco’s Mesh Potato telecommunications device that promises to make the technology sustainable in the long term in rural communities. Village Telco was incorporated by Steve Song in 2011 during a three-year stint
Last week’s national policy colloquium, organised by the department of communications, drew a degree of cynicism from the telecoms industry. The view among many industry players is that it’s the same old rhetoric with no action. Will this time be different? The industry can be forgiven for suffering from “colloquium fatigue”. Politicians
When he isn’t talking at technology conferences and seminars, or travelling to them, 49-year-old Steve Song lives and works in Durbanville near Cape Town. He’s perhaps best known for his map of the various submarine cables that have landed in Africa in recent years, and for his passionate advocacy of the use of television white-spaces
Consumers can look forward to even cheaper broadband prices, with many new undersea cables set to come online within the next 18 months. It is unclear how much of a decrease is likely, but talk in the industry is of a 10% to 20% drop in local prices
In its framework for the licensing of high demand spectrum, published last week, the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) says it intends to reserve a portion of the 2,6GHz band for a “managed spectrum park”. The idea, it seems, is to make spectrum
The National Planning Commission’s National Development Plan, released last week, makes several proposals for growing the information and communications technology industry, one of the most interesting of which is that the country should allow companies to
“White spaces.” These chunks of radio frequency spectrum allocated to broadcasters but not used could hold the solution to SA’s electronic communications challenges. Steve Song, founder of Village Telco — a social enterprise that uses open-source
Could an electronic “potato” rescue Africa from poorly developed and expensive communications infrastructure? Steve Song, telecommunications fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, thinks it could go a long way in helping. Song is involved in a project that is developing an innovative open-source project called the Mesh Potato, a sub-US$100 device that he says will bring cheap communications access to the continent.