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WCape expands WiFi zone network

Simnikiwe Mzekandaba
By Simnikiwe Mzekandaba, IT in government editor
Johannesburg, 27 Sept 2016
The Western Cape adds 22 more public WiFi zones in the province.
The Western Cape adds 22 more public WiFi zones in the province.

An additional 22 public WiFi hotspot zones went live in the Western Cape province yesterday.

The new hotspots form part of provincial government and Neotel's public access WiFi project. This brings the total of locations where citizens can access free WiFi in the Western Cape to 72 hotspots.

Also dubbed NeoHotspots, the first 50 of the public WiFi hotspots were launched by premier Helen Zille, minister of economic opportunities Alan Winde and Neotel in March.

Winde said the project aims to activate one hotspot in each of the province's 384 municipal wards by 2018. "A further 88 hotspots will go live between now and March next year, bringing the total number of hotspots we have launched since March to 150. The remaining 234 will be installed in the 2017/2018 financial year."

Over the next few months, WiFi hotspots will be installed in Beaufort West, Bitou, Breede Valley, Cederberg, Drakenstein, Knysna, Laingsburg, Mossel Bay and Oudsthoorn.

Winde also gave a progress report on usage at the existing 50 hotspots. "In the five months since the first NeoHotspots went live, usage has steadily increased with more than 37 000 devices having connected to the limited free service, and over 1.7TB of free data being used to download and upload information."

The Western Cape WiFi project is based on limited free Internet access, which allows every device that connects to one of the NeoHotspots a free allocation of 250MB of data every month. Furthermore, government Web sites and a basic 'Internet Champion' digital literacy course are permanently free to browse.

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