Keynote Speakers
David Johnson, CSIR (Meraka), South Africa
Title:"African Research and Development on White Spaces (TVWS) technologies, and an African Agenda and Governance for African TVWS e-Infrastructure and e-Business"
Short Bio: David believes in a fair open society where all people on the planet have access to the body knowledge that is accumulated over the past few thousand years. The answer came with the printing press to distribute knowledge that was in the hands of a few elite but the answer today is getting everyone a decent connection to the Internet, where decent is a moving target which for now probably stands at about 2Mbps. David has been working for the past 8 years looking at technologies that can help make this happen. He strongly believes in the opening up more free wireless spectrum and in the immense power of open source everything to allow for unfettered creativity in this space. David has helped design and build South Africa's first rural wireless mesh networks, built an indoor 7x7 wireless mesh simulator (one of 3 in the world), published widely on mesh networks, rural connectivity and Internet architecture for rural areas often trapped behind slow Internet links. His current interest is using abandoned or unused TV frequencies (white spaces) for Internet connectivity in hard-to-reach places. This field is growing and he regards this is just the beginning of a wave of changes that will rock the way we have managed wireless spectrum essentially trapped in 1930s thinking.
