Browsing by Author "Roro, Zukile"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Community-based solar power revenue alternative to improve sustainability of a rural wireless mesh network
    (ACM, 2013) Rey-Moreno, Carlos; Roro, Zukile; Tucker, William David; Siya, Masbulele Jay
    Given the needs for a clean and easy way to maintain and secure powering wireless networks in rural areas and to gen- erate revenue to guarantee the sustainability of its intended goals, an innovative approach to leverage solar power to ad- dress both needs is presented herein. Results comprise em- powered locals trained to ensure local maintenance and ap- propriation; local usage and maintenance data; and a cost- ing of the solution and its maintenance after 10 months of operation. It is shown that the solution presented can be lo- cally maintained and could provide enough revenue for the wireless network to continue providing its intended goals.
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    Experiences, challenges and lessons from rolling out a rural WiFi mesh network
    (ACM, 2013) Rey-Moreno, Carlos; Tucker, William David; Bidwell, Nicola J.; Roro, Zukile; Siya, Masbulele Jay; Simo-Reigadas, Javier
    The DEV community knows that technology interventions involve consideration of social and environmental factors as much as technical ones. This is particularly true for the introduction of communications infrastructure in rural im- poverished areas. Research into WiFi solutions has fallen o as ubiquitous mobile solutions penetrate even the deepest rural communities worldwide. This paper argues that mo- bile penetration su ers from two signi cant problems such that the latest wave of WiFi mesh networks o ers bene- ts that traditional top-down WiFi, and mobile, networks do not. In addition, we propose ethnographic and partici- patory methods to aid the e ective rollout of mesh inverse infrastructure with and for a given community. This paper describes and then analyzes a mesh for voice rollout within a situated context. We explain how to conduct informed com- munity co-design and how to factor in local socio-political concerns that can strongly impact on the design, rollout and subsequent maintenance of community-based wireless mesh networks. While we have not yet analyzed baseline and ini- tial usage data, as the mesh rollout is still very fresh, we do have new lessons to o er the DEV community that we have learned while establishing this baseline study.
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    Socio-economic aspects of voice-over-IP technology in rural SA
    (Telkom, 2012) Roro, Zukile; Rey-Moreno, Carlos; Tucker, William David; Siya, Masbulele Jay
    This paper describes work in progress towards developing a business case and preliminary design for an 802.11-based mesh network in the remote rural community of Mankosi in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Aside from the technical challenges to building the network to be sustainable in the long term, this network needs to generate some revenue. Hence, there needs to be a business model that has revenue generation potential. This study will explore the economical and social aspects of voice over Internet- Protocol as a service for this community. After talking to the village leaders, we learned that there is a demand for telecommunication services and that most of them were interested only in telephony service. Very few villagers were interested in or had any knowledge about the Internet. We also learned that most of their cellular phone calls are local within the Mankosi community. This allows us to deploy an experimental local telephony service; a perfect opportunity for a low-cost and lowcosting inverse mesh infrastructure that can easily be connected to breakout and Internet services in the future.
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    Towards a sustainable business model for rural telephony
    (Telkom, 2012) Rey-Moreno, Carlos; Roro, Zukile; Siya, Masbulele Jay; Simo-Reigadas, Javier; Bidwell, Nicola J.; Tucker, William David
    This paper presents the work done thus far towards designing a sustainable business model for rural telephony in the community of Mankosi, located in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. The pillars of the model are sustainability and community ownership to design both the wireless mesh network providing the telephony service and its business model. Given the airtime consumption pattern in the community, the model is based only on the provision of calls inside the community and for using solar power to charge mobile phones. Some scenarios with different usage of the telephony services and different pricing rates are explored in order to find the break even point of the network, or in case the CAPEX was provided externally, to calculate the revenues expected. These revenues could be used for projects that benefit the community at large. Although the project is in its initial phase and the community has some particularities that make it unique, the sustainable business model presented here is intended to showcase innovative ideas that could serve similar projects in other parts of the world.