First Posted at: https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/456030402/corrected-university-of-cape-town-awarded-opencellular-grant-to-test-small-cell-technology-connected-by-ammbr-routers
Ammbr Research Labs (ARL) are delighted to announce that, Dr. David Johnson, Head of ARL South Africa and Dr. Melissa Densmore and their University of Cape Town team in the UCT Centre in ICT for Development in have been awarded the OpenCellular Grant by the Telecom Infra Project. The Grant will provide OpenCellular units and project funding for the first Wave of OC Grant recipients.
UCT is collaborating with ARL on networking technology that can be deployed in areas where the cost of access is prohibitively high for residents or in areas where connectivity is absent or limited. The collaboration will see iNethi (inethi.org.za), the University of Cape Town (UCT) and ARL South Africa conduct a pilot program in the community of Ocean View, where the Ammbr mesh routers combined with open cellular base stations will be utilized to overcome the high costs of access to content and affordable last-mile access and connect the community of Ocean View to a host of opportunities through localized services and internet access.
Dr. David Johnson, who is also an adjunct senior lecturer at UCT, a director at iNethi and leads the South African branch of ARL has been working with members of the Ocean View community with his colleagues at UCT since the early days of iNethi’s community wireless network projects.
“The OpenCellular grant shows that the Telecom Infra Project believes in the capability of this team to show high impact,” Dr. Johnson explained. “The support from them both financially and institutionally represents a massive step forward in our plans to successfully deploy a mix of wide coverage lower bandwidth small cell technology and higher bandwidth WiFi access connected by mesh networking. This technology will provide free and low-cost access to locally relevant content and the Internet. I’d like to thank all of my colleagues in the Ocean View Community, University of Cape Town, and the iNethi team without whose hard work this deal and the bright future for community owned networks would not be possible.”
While there are still a few administrative details yet to be completed, you can expect the pilot program to start deployments in Q1 2019.
I was happy to see that in cape town there is a kind of community network where I will be in touch to find out how I can work with you to provide a low cost WiFi community network, I m part of internet society guatend chapter so I will contact you for further talks .keep doing a good things