The following goals have been identified by the WAPA management committee and will be WAPA’s main focus in 2010: 1. Spectrum: Light Licensing Strategy ; Getting spectrum allocated for use by WAPA members 2. Awareness: Promoting Wireless ISP services to the wider public ; Roadshows to attract more members 3. Self-regulation: High Site Training and Enforcement 4. Services to members: [...]

For the past few months I’ve been working on the LTSP-Cluster team at Revolution Linux. Today we’re releasing the website so that we can tell the world what we’ve been doing!

LTSP-Cluster is a set of tools and plugins for LTSP that allows you to extend LTSP so that it can scale up to hundreds of servers and thousands of LTSP clients. It has a nice web interface for your LTSP configuration, does load balancing between your servers and more. It can even connect your LTSP thin client to a cluster of Windows terminal servers or NX servers, if you’re into that sort of thing. If you’re deploying LTSP soon, you’d probably want to investigate LTSP-Cluster, and I’m not just saying it because I’m involved in the project

It’s licensed under the GPLv3 license and supported by the LTSP community, you can also get commercial support *wink* *wink* from Revolution Linux where plenty of very skilled people are ready for your LTSP related needs.

Wireless networks are popping up all over South Africa, with an estimate of 500-800 unlicensed networks out there at present. WAPA understands that many of the wireless service providers are small and it could be argued that getting licenced is a costly operation for a small business but the new licensing framework is very clear [...]

This article first appeared in FinWeek English Edition 21 January 2010. It is written by Simon Dingle.



HENK KLEYNHANS is on a mission. Internet access in South Africa is expensive and beyond the reach of most of the country’s citizens and he plans to change that. While the realities about telecommunications are changing, challenges still abound. Kleynhans’s company – Skyrove – is focused on empowering people to not only get connected but also use their collective strength to overcome high prices and other challenges. The company hasn’t only been successful in doing so but recently attracted millions in international funding.



Kleynhans founded Skyrove while at the University of Cape Town to enable students staying in digs to share the costs of Internet connectivity. It was at the time wireless net- working was becoming commonplace and he realised it would be a good way for him to share an Internet connection with other students.



“So I installed an ADSL line and wire- less router and started collecting money at the end of every month from other students who wanted to use it. But that wasn’t an equitable way of doing it, because some students would be away for holidays and not want to pay for that month, while others would download larger amounts of data than anyone else while paying the same rates.



“So I looked at billing systems for hotspots overseas. There were some good ones, but they were all time-based – allowing you to bill by the hour, for example. That wasn’t ideal for SA, where bandwidth is expensive and limited,” says Kleynhans. “Some people would go berserk with the connection while others were just checking their email: it didn’t make sense to charge them all the same amount.”



Kleynhans and a business partner developed their own system for billing hotspot users based on usage, not time. It was a new concept and a first of its kind worldwide. “It would allow us to get the Internet to more people at a cheaper price. And the hotspot owners – be it students at res, restaurant owners or anybody really – can then easily sell bandwidth and become entrepreneurs themselves.”



The business soon attracted the attention of investors in San Francisco in the United States, who provided the company with money to get going. Skyrove started supplying its own routers running dedicated software. Anyone can buy one of those, plug it into their Internet connection and begin selling bandwidth, or using the system to connect a group of people. It now has more than 500 hotspots in SA and over 20 000 registered users.



Kleynhans is a serial entrepreneur. His mind tills over the problems we all face and ways we can solve them together. I once attended a conference where he used the group of delegates to brainstorm problems in SA’s electricity supply. He’s also outspoken about the way bureaucracy limits business.



“South African businesses are mired in bureaucracy, with some of it – such as the 1961 Exchange Control Act – being borne of solid apartheid era protective thinking and preventing companies from selling goods in foreign currency to foreign buyers on the Internet – which is the world’s biggest marketplace.”



He says another barrier for businesses in SA is funding. “But I believe once you remove the red tape it will also become much easier for money to flow into this country and thus for entrepreneurs to raise funds,” he says.



Skyrove has been highly successful in that department, having recently signed a multi-million rand investment deal with Jersey-based 4Di Capital. Skyrove also recently closed an investment deal with Internet service provider Cybersmart.



“The most important part of investment in a start-up is the relationship you have with the investor and not just the money he’ll invest,” says Kleynhans. “Our investors ‘get it’. They understand Skyrove’s business model and how critical it will be to connectivity in Africa. Second, my investors are entrepreneurs them- selves. They know what it takes to start a business and how incredibly hard it can be at times.”



However, Kleynhans suggests companies shouldn’t get caught up in funding. “Raising funds is great – but don’t be afraid to bootstrap either. Before we got funding for Skyrove my co-founder – Allister Kreft – and I were selling computers, conducting market research for corporates, teaching students and living on Provitas – literally,” he says. “I rented a five bedroom house and then sublet four of them, with my wife and I staying in the fifth (just married and just graduated) while we started the business in the attic. We didn’t have to pay any rent – either for our room or for the business.”



Those days are long gone for Kleynhans and the company. Skyrove goes from strength to strength and he believes it will remain relevant, even once Internet connectivity in SA is sorted out.



“Skyrove’s primary focus is providing the convenience of fast and stable Internet connectivity without the need of contracts or line rentals. Right now we’re able to do this at much cheaper rates because we’re able to split an expensive Telkom line with many people and bring the cost down. As the price of bandwidth comes down in the future, you’ll see more users using more bandwidth for video, VoIP, social networking and web applications,” he says.



SIMON DINGLE simond@finweek.co.za

As Scott posted before, the Edubuntu Bug day went quite well last week. This coming Thursday (21 January) we’re doing a Wiki Hug Day to to focus our efforts on fixing things in the Edubuntu wiki namespace, it includes:

• Fixing broken links
• Removing horribly obsolete or broken pages
• Moving pages which are in the wrong place
• Prettifying pages
• Mark pages that may need to be on the Edubuntu website instead
• Any other improvements we can think of

We’ll officially be starting the wiki hug day from around 12:00 UTC to accommodate the time-zones of our current contributors. It will be co-ordinated in #edubuntu on the freenode network. If you’re familiar with Edubuntu and know a thing or two about wikis, feel free to join in and get involved!

Posted via email from geekrebel's posterous

Business Day - PUBLISHED: 2009/11/24 06:24:08 AM



TELKOM ’S monopoly over landline communications may officially be over, but its continued control of the “last mile” of copper leading to most customers’ homes will remain a stumbling block to affordable internet access in SA for some time to come.



That means even the prospect of a huge increase in the amount of available international bandwidth in the coming few years, as various new undersea fibre-optic cables are linked up to an upgraded national network, does not necessarily mean that every home in the country will have instant access to cheap and fast internet services.



For existing home internet users that is an annoyance, and for the poor it is one of many bricks in the wall that constitutes the digital divide.



But for Cape-based internet entrepreneur Henk Kleynhans it is a virtual guarantee that the company he founded in 2004 will have a large pool of potential customers for the foreseeable future.



Skyrove enables small businesses such as coffee shops and guesthouses — or entrepreneurs wanting to on-sell wireless internet access — to set up WiFi “hotspots” with a radius of about 50m, and either hand out vouchers as a service to customers or take a share of the fee that can then be charged for bandwidth.



“We realise that there’s nothing we can do about Telkom’s monopoly over the last mile of copper,” says Kleynhans. “But we can stake a claim to the last 50m by helping people set up their own hotspots and gain access to the internet wirelessly and cost-effectively.”



Potential hotspot providers must have an ADSL line in place before signing up with Skyrove and paying a once-off amount of about R1000 for a high-speed modem and wireless router.



That part of the service is unremarkable since there is nothing stopping anyone from setting up a hotspot for their own or customers’ benefit — indeed, many coffee shop franchisees already do.



But keeping tabs on who is tapping into your hotspot is difficult in such circumstances, as is preventing a few individuals from hogging all the bandwidth. And it is impossible to set up a viable business selling internet access if you can’t control usage and bill accordingly.



These were precisely the problems Kleynhans encountered when he was living in a student digs while studying at the University of Cape Town in the early 2000s and couldn’t afford the R1200 a month it then cost to have an ADSL line installed. He realised it would only be viable if he could share the costs with his housemates and students in nearby digs, but in those days the technology to do so wirelessly was not only primitive but using it for commercial gain was illegal.



Kleynhans, who is now 31 and recently became a father for the first time, recalls that he wrote the business model for a service that would allow him to bill people for the megabytes they used in a sudden burst of inspiration at 4am on the night before a maths exam.



“I felt that breaking the law was justified under the circumstances,” he says.



The following year, his last of a four-year computer engineering degree, lecturers and fellow students were roped in to help Kleynhans refine the business plan, and Skyrove was launched at the end of 2004, shortly after he graduated.



The first outside investor came on board the following year, which allowed the company to hire a programmer and go to market with the world’s first prepaid per- megabyte WiFi billing solution. Skyrove now has more than 500 hotspots in operation around SA, and is adding about 20 new ones to the list each month.



Skyrove won the Enablis Business Report Competition in 2005, and the Technology Top 100 Award for Most Promising Emerging Enterprise in 2006. In July this year internet service provider (ISP) Cybersmart took a stake in the company, and in October a multimillion-rand investment deal was signed with US-based 4Di Capital, a venture capital group that is trying to establish Cape Town as SA’s Silicon Valley.



Kleynhans says the injection of cash in exchange for equity, which has left him with a stake in the business of about 25%, will allow Skyrove to invest in a proper marketing strategy for the first time as well as take advantage of 4Di’s experience in taking technology startups to the next level. The goal is to triple the size of the Skyrove network over the coming 12 months, which means creating at least 1000 new hotspots.



The key to achieving this, he says, is the simplicity of the process. “I call it the dad test: would my dad be comfortable using the system?” To gain access to a Skyrove hotspot, users — be they casual coffee shop customers or B&B guests making use of free vouchers or residents of apartment blocks serviced by hotspot entrepreneurs — log onto the company’s website from their laptops and either enter the voucher number and password, or buy bandwidth credits using their credit card.



The amount charged per megabyte, if anything, is entirely at the discretion of the hotspot owner or “Skyrover”. Kleynhans says the average currently is a little over 30c, which seems high compared with the 7c most home ADSL users are paying their ISPs. But that fails to take into account the line rental fee demanded by Telkom, which comes to well over R400 a month for a high-speed line.



So Skyrove’s value proposition remains attractive for casual internet users in particular, at least until they start using more than two or three gigabytes of bandwidth a month. And that will not change much even when bandwidth costs start coming down.



In fact, Kleynhans believes lower line rentals — but not too much lower — would be to Skyrove’s advantage as more potential hotspot entrepreneurs would be able to afford to become Skyrovers.



So far, there has been little penetration in the townships, which he puts down to the difficulty in getting an ADSL line installed and a too-low concentration of laptops, rather than the cost of bandwidth.



The revenue generated by each hotspot varies widely depending on the pricing model being followed, the highest being one serving an 80-room hotel that brings in about R30000 a month. But Kleynhans says many Skyrovers are not in it for the money; they want to be able to offer free internet access to guests or customers while retaining control of their bandwidth usage.



His immediate goal is to ramp up the marketing of the Skyrove concept and get many more hotspots up and running before the World Cup. “Guest houses used to see WiFi as a nice-to-have value add to attract guests, but now they’re realising that it’s an absolute necessity. Foreign visitors expect internet access, and those that come here for the World Cup are going to want to be able to take photographs and share them with their families back home.”



Kleynhans believes Skyrove’s potential SA market is still “absolutely massive”, but the next stage in the company’s strategy is to test the waters in other developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South America, where large parts of the population have similar hassles accessing the internet.



The key … is the simplicity of the process. I call it the dad test: would my dad be comfortable using the system?

I've been running Windows 7 for a while now on my desktop and this weekend installed it on my Acer Aspire One netbook. Here are the applications I'll be keeping on a USB Flash Drive for future installs: 

My iWeek presentation about WAPA and wireless industry self regulation: 2009-09-02-wapa.pdf (90KB)

From an interview with EngineerIT: Self-regulation is the way to go

Can’t say I like that photo too much but it’s a good article.

This blog has been a bit quiet for a long time.. so here is something I found on our sales mailing list today which Abz sent to explain our entry level solutions..

We differ from most consumer oriented ISPs in that we specialize in custom specific solutions and the way our products and services are structured.

For instance, if you wanted to host a static website, domain, and 3 email addresses you could probably get a shared hosting package from one of the popular consumer ISPs for R20/m.

We can do all of the above, but we don’t offer shared hosting so we would either give you rack space in our data centre to host your own server(s) or offer you your own dedicated server with Apache, PHP, etc pre-installed, a mail server and domain hosting. Our quotation would look something like:

Xen Virtual Server (128MB Memory, 3GB Disk Space) @ R 250 + R 70/m

Mail Server @ R 600 + R 295/m

Domain Hosting @ R 30 + R 12/m

Internet (1GB, 20c/MB thereafter) @ R 370/m

Labour (1 hour @ R 550/h - Web/FTP setup) @ R 550

Total: R 1430 + R 747/m

As you can see a lot more expensive.

But now let’s say you want a firewall in front of your servers, you have an office which you want to connect to the Internet, some staff members that have ADSL at home, and you want to manage all of your services for you, we could add offer you an ADSL package which is uncapped, bandwidth shared among all your accounts for your staff members, an ADSL VPN / Wireless for your office with static ips, direct connectivity to your hosted services at our data centre, we’ll take over the ADSL lines from Telkom and manage them for you, offer you a managed firewall, etc.

As you can see, you don’t necessarily need to be a big company to deal with us, but it doesn’t really make a lot of business sense to say only host a website and domain with us. If we look at all your connectivity needs it may be a completely different story.

Joe created a brief intro document about SchoolWAN for a tuXlabs and school connectivity workshop (2009-02-25).

Please note that we have updated our ISPA Code of Conduct Compliance details. You’ll find our Content Take Down Policy and Acceptable Use Policy here.

SchoolWAN is now an associate member of WAPA, the Wireless Access Providers’ Association of South Africa.