streaming Netflix on his smartphone on the back seat of a battered old car in Ext 27 in Olievenhoutbosch – a sprawling township near Centurion in Gauteng – when TechCentral visited him on a sweltering Sunday afternoon earlier this month.
, doesn’t install them on informal dwellings), but he’d recently moved to Ext 27 from elsewhere in Olievenhoutbosch where he’d had access. And he decided he couldn’t live without uncapped internet, so he put up a core node on his new abode, as basic as his accommodation is. Riot Network, which was founded in 2017, is the brainchild of its three founders, CEO Jarryd Bekker, chief operating officer Moses Mpofu and senior radiofrequency developer Daniel de Kock, who had been tinkering for some time with solutions to reduce the cost of internet access in low-income communities.
Bekker told TechCentral that Riot’s founders realised that to drive down the cost of connectivity, it made sense to allow communities to deploy the infrastructure themselves. So, DStv installers are empowered to put up both core nodes and leaf nodes, and to connect them – all using unlicensed spectrum in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, the same frequencies you use to connect to your Wi-Fi router at home.