Internet connectivity at Brackenhill Primary School has always been a challenge.

The WCED in conjunction with the Department of the Premier rolled out the Broadband initiative where most of the schools were connected to the internet, but as a rural farm school offering multigrade teaching, our school is classified as off-the- grid and did not form part of the initiative.

We had to source alternative ways to connect to the internet. We do, however, qualify for the connectivity fee, which the WCED is offering to smaller schools to finance their own  network connectivity.

We had been using a dongle to connect to the internet for our admin PC. This has a Vodacom/Gig (Prepaid) option and is only connected when reception is good as we are surrounded by trees (plantation).

Telkom at the time signed roaming agreements with Vodacom and we used Telkom 2 Gig per month.

Fiber cables were laid along the N2. These cables pass our school but we could not connect as our area was not “fiber ready”.

Several ISP’s were contacted to offer solutions but with no luck as the location of our school could not be picked up by their towers.

After discussions with Mark Mosdell from Knysna High School, I was referred to an article from MyBroadway. A company called Supersonic offers LTE through MTN and we were covered in their area.

We first got the 60 Gig plan then moved up to the 100 Gig plan. Recently they introduced the uncapped Light plan on which we are currently.

The technician of KILT-Edunova, Easton Pretorius , managed to connect the router to the network, and added an extra access point in the intermediate phase class. We currently have our computers, laptops, tablets and cellphones connected. Everyone from the staff to the cleaners are connected on the internet. 

Our speed is fair. On a good day we have a download speed of more than 60mbps. 

We can safely say that we are now connected and moving Forward!

Denis Jantjies
Principal Brackenhill Primary School