Rey-Moreno, CarlosTucker, William DavidCull, DomonicBlom, R.2015-10-292015-10-292015Rey-Moreno, C. et al. (2015). Making a community network legal within the South African regulatory framework. In Seventh International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD ’15) (Article 57). Singapore: ACM Press, New York, New York.978-1-4503-3163-0http://hdl.handle.net/10566/1948Community networks often operate at the fringe of legality with respect to spectrum, network infrastructure and providing services. We have been involved with such a network in a rural community, and together with them, have devised a way to become legal within the South African regulatory framework. A not-for-profit co-operative was formed and successfully applied for license exemption to operate the network infrastructure and offer services. Revenue is used to sustain the network and can also be used for other community needs. The network has equipment that is not 100% type-approved, and operates at a higher output power than is allowed. However, we have a simple plan to comply with such regulations. This paper offers our experience as a precedent for how to go about making a community network completely legal in South Africa and other countries that have a similar regulatory environment.enPermission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.Government technology policyWireless access networksWireless local area networksElectronic communicationGovernmental regulationsConference Proceedings