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Free WiFi a hit at Zuma inauguration

With all eyes on the parliament buildings in Cape Town this evening for the president’s State of the Nation address, nervous journalists must be wondering how the local phone networks are going to cope with a sudden influx of live tweeting, blogging and streaming updates from the event.

If only they had free WiFi, like they do at the Union Buildings in Pretoria.

The historic building was connected to the Project Isizwe network of public WiFi hotspots just in time for Jacob Zuma’s inauguration at the end of May. Isizwe and its various technology partners have released a bit of stat-gasm this morning describing how many people logged in on the first day of operation.

According to Isizwe’s Zahir Khan, some 20 000 people attended the address, of whom 761 (3.8%) logged on to the free WiFi system – almost double the number expected. Half of those who used the service logged on within 30 seconds of the swearing in of the president.

They didn’t just log on once: 5 538 total sessions were made throughout the day and – here’s the critical bit – at an average download speed of 9.3Mbps. Which means we’re about to move our entire office to the Union Buildings, because the free WiFi access is going to remain for tourists and other visitors for the foreseeable future… and it is better than our ADSL.

The big question is what did people use? Unsurprisingly, Android was the most popular operating system, followed by Windows. But before Windows Phone enthusiasts get too excited, though, this probably says more about tablets and laptops without 3G connectivity than popularity of handsets. It seems reasonable to assume, for example, that iPhone owners have enough of a data cap not to use free WiFi for limited periods of time.

Here’s that chart in full:

Thanks to Isizwe and its partners at Westcon and Ruckus for those stats.

[Image – CC 2.0 A SA Zakysant]

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