Tshwane’s free Wi-Fi project is here to stay.
This assurance was given by the metro on Tuesday.
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It said problems accessing the Wi-Fi stemmed from infrastructure or maintenance hitches.
“It has nothing to do with budgetary issues or threats about the continuation of the project,” the metro said.
MMC for corporate and shared services Cilliers Brink told Rekord: “We are committed to the continuation of the Tshwane Free Wi-Fi project.”
The availability of free Wi-Fi under this project was ensured until the end of July, the end of our financial year, said Brink.
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“The R245 million earmarked for the project has been spent. It is all paid for. That includes all payments for maintenance and service of the system. All operational costs are already paid.”
The only things affecting Wi-Fi availability were power outages and fibre-cable breaks, said Brink.
He said a major outage of TshWiFi was experienced in Soshanguve as a result of cable theft.
The mayor’s spokesperson, Samkelo Mgobozi said: “The service was operating as it always had, with only standard site outages and responses and repairs within the agreed service level agreement.
“The only unavailability of hot spots were related to outages due to power failure, fibre breaks or equipment faults.
Mgobozi assured that the metro responded to and repaired outages within agreed service levels.
“While some sites may experience long outages due to fibre breaks that could take a few days to repair, the majority of sites remain consistently active and served almost 300,000 daily connections across the city,” said Mgobozi.
The project was run in conjunction with the NGO Project Isizwe, which had a service agreement with the metro.
“We are partnering with Project Isizwe to deal with the problem areas,” said Brink.
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Project spokesperson Peter Adolphs said outages in real time were being tracked.
“We are achieving our service agreement obligations by having a standard above 95 percent (of systems running). We are delivering the service we were tasked with,” said Adolphs.
Mgobozi said: “The mayor has reiterated on numerous occasions that the TshWiFi service was here to stay and that together we will find a way to make it affordable and sustainable through working with the service provider and the private sector.”
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