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Braamfontein bench offers free, green WiFi

Michelle Avenant
By Michelle Avenant, portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 11 Sept 2015
The Isabelo smart bench in The Grove Square, Braamfontein offers free, unlimited WiFi in exchange for market research data.
Photo by Annalize Nel
The Isabelo smart bench in The Grove Square, Braamfontein offers free, unlimited WiFi in exchange for market research data. Photo by Annalize Nel

Scoring free WiFi in Braamfontein no longer involves forking out for a flat white at one of its coffee shops.

The Isabelo smart bench, introduced this week in The Grove square, offers free unlimited WiFi and USB ports for charging phones and tablets, all from a solar-powered piece of concrete street furniture.

Designed by Adriaan Hugo of Braamfontein design company Dokter and Misses, the Isabelo smart bench features four horizontal arms - enough to seat at least six people - extending from a central tower housing four USB ports and the bench's WiFi equipment. Atop this tower sit the bench's solar panels, and a light fixture for night-time use.

Isabelo means "to share" in Zulu, and echoes the design's mandate to facilitate sharing, both through sharing public spaces and sharing content online, explains Louise Meek, founder of Public Access Consulting, the start-up behind the project.

Though offering a free service, the bench makes money by leveraging data from its users. To access the bench's WiFi, users complete a short questionnaire about themselves, delivering real-time, location-specific information to market researchers.

Isabelo reported an increasing average of 50 users an hour on Thursday, some of which expressed admiration via social media. "Tried out free wifi, updated my apps, charged my phone and met my Tumblr obsession," @leratombangeni said on Twitter.

Meek's team received R250 000 to develop the smart bench from the Green City Startup, a competition funded by the City of Johannesburg and the University of Johannesburg, after making it into the competition's top eight in march.

The team hopes to win the next round of the challenge, which could land them R1 million, with which they can roll out more benches throughout the city by the end of 2015, and in other SA cities within the next year.

Before installing the concrete Isabelo smart bench in The Grove, the team debuted a plywood prototype of the bench in the Maboneng precinct in May, before trying out the bench in two other venues and eventually showing off the final product in Braamfontein.

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