[wsfii-discuss] The Empire Strikes Back: South Africa

Wed Feb 18 07:04:55 UTC 2009

Tragically, yesterday the South African regulatory agency ICASA confiscated (without warrant or notice) equipment being used by the Mesh Potato project in its Village Telco implementation. The excuse (given verbally on the telephone) was illegal use of wireless equipment, against which the local telco (named Telkom) had filed a complaint on grounds of wireless interference. 

It appears from discussions on the Village Telco list (at Googlegroups) that the ISM band in South Africa is still not free-to-use, and also that licensed wireless networks (but not WISPs) must not allow their signals to cross roads (al la Canute?). However, in this case, Village Telco evidently has the requisite WISP license, so one must view the situation with some gloom. 

Apologies for cross-posting: I know (through a recent round of introductions) that many of our listmembers are already on the Village Telco list. 

 Vickram
http://communicall.wordpress.com
http://vvcrishna.wordpress.com

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