Professor Willie Cronje and his team of Ph.D. The Fiber Before the Fiber Project has teamed up with another innovative project also developed in the School of Electrical and Information Engineering. The ability to power the system is key to the sustainability of this Project. Credit: Optical Communications Laboratory | WITS UNIVERSITY The OC Lab, together with the Structured Light Laboratory headed by Professor Andrew Forbes at Wits University, and the UK collaborators, Professor Martin Lavery (Glasgow) and Professor Andrew Ellis (Aston), have over the past several years been researching and developing low-cost, long-range, high-speed wireless optical communication technologies.Īn experimental setup in the Optical Communications Laboratory used to develop optimal error correction schemes. "Access to the internet enables children to broaden their horizons and expand their curiosity: something that I believe leads to much-needed scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs." "What are the opportunities if we could simply 'light up' that digital divide?" asks Cox. While there are over 50 million smartphones with access to the internet in use in South Africa, Cox says data costs are too high and mobile internet is not fast enough to provide an entire building, such as a school with connectivity suitable for streaming video, for example. Mitchell Cox, co-founder of the OC Lab at Wits University, says: "In cities like Johannesburg there's a stark contrast between informal settlements that don't have fiber and nearby affluent suburbs, often just across the road, that do." It was conceptualized before the COVID-19 pandemic that has dramatically worsened the digital divide due to the increased reliance on electricity and communication technologies for remote learning, working, and accessing health care services.
The 'Fiber Before the Fiber Project' is a collaboration between Wits University in South Africa and the Universities of Glasgow and Aston in the UK. This is how the new Optical Communications Laboratory (OC Lab) in the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University) in Johannesburg plans to bridge the peri-urban digital divide in South Africa.Ī two-year project is underway to demonstrate the use of wireless optical technologies to provide flexible and rapidly deployable communications infrastructure that researchers say will be a 'fiber before the fiber' solution for communities not yet connected to existing fiber infrastructure.
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