Welcome to the future, kids. Stellenbosch is about to become the first town in Africa to offer fast and free Wi-Fi accross the entire town. The project is a collaboration between the municipality, Mxit and the University of Stellenbosch. It’s even stretching into the suburbs and neighbouring towns. Très cool.

They’re not standing still either – the trial network, which will cover the town centre, is ready to go live on Friday! The network will then be rolled out to all populated areas within the Stellenbosch municipality. This includes areas over the Helshoogte pass, such as Franschhoek and Pniel. What this essentially means is that if you’re sitting at home, and you don’t have ADSL access, you should be able to pick up Stellenbosch Wi-Fi from your desk.

The service will be offered free of charge, and no regisration will be required. Large downloads will be prohibited, and each user will only receive 500MB of data a day at a speed of 1 mbps. Still, that is pretty damn mental.

All that needs to be done now is to install repeaters closer to residents to “fill in” the network and boost coverage.  These repeaters will be placed on lamp poles and on other suitably high sites.

This is all made possible through a collaboration between Stellenbosch University and Mxit, who have agreed to share some of their bandwidth with the project. The university currently has a 1GBps connection and Mxit has stated that unused bandwith will be given to the project.

It is hoped that this project will attract technical entrepreneurs to the area, which is fast becoming one of South Africa’s tech hubs. This begs the question – when is this going to happen in the mother city?

[Source: MyBroadband]