Over the weekend I had the honour of meeting up with Skyrove head honcho Henk Kleynhans.
Henk had the idea of creating pay per use Internet as a student, in his own words he said “I couldn’t afford Internet unless I found a way to share with digs mates & neighbours [but] without them chowing all my bandwidth. that was back in late 2003 when Wi-Fi was just starting to make inroads.”
He started the company in Jan 2005, shortly after graduating and got finance in May 2005, hired a programmer, then went live with the first hotspot in greenmarket square in Dec 2005,
the rest as they say is history, and they now have over 3281 Skyrove end-users !!
Skyrove at present has over 80 live accounts and is growing all the time, most of the hotspots are in South Africa, however plans are already in place for the system to work in the rest of the world and they already have some hotspots in London and the USA!
The way the system works is that you sign up for an account online and pay a small amount for a skyrove wireless router (as shown above), then connect the router to your existing modem, set up your account, and then other people within range of your wireless hub can sign up for a user account, buy credits and then surf the web for a small cost based per MB.
The cost per MB is set up by the provider and up to 70% of the revenue received is debited into your account every month. All tech calls are handled by Skyrove and even pamphlets for you potential clients are emailed to you, so there is very little the provider needs to do apart from have an existing broadband account. The more users you get the cheaper the service can be and also the account holder can then afford to increase the speed and bandwidth of the account.
Anyway to cut a long story short I’m sold on the idea, and so from now on if you happen to live near High Cape in Cape Town you can now get cheap wireless internet from my house. For a look at some of the other places you can find Skyrove click here to see their Google maps of providers !!
For more info you can go to there website at http://www.skyrove.com/ or feel free to call them on +27 21 448 8843.
P.S. If your worried this might be technical to set up fear not as its real easy, and besides if you need any help the fab guys at Skyrove will guide you through it.
Cheers
Chris