Please note - Ndiyo has now officially closed its doors, at least as a legal entity - but we've kept the site alive in case any of the information is useful to others.

Our thanks to all those who helped out and were involved in so many different ways! The Ndiyo legacy lives on in the ultra-thin-client work at its spin-off DisplayLink, at Plugable, at NoPC and elsewhere...

Ndiyo in South Africa

Submitted by qsf on Tue, 04/04/2006 - 14:13

Two more Ndiyo installations are now operational in a South African township.

On the 22nd March 2006, as part of a larger project manged by the GSM Association, Ndiyo installed two systems in Attridgeville, a township on the outskirts of Pretoria. The aim was to see whether connecting an Ndiyo network to the internet via a mobile phone link offers a way to provide online access in locations where traditional PC-based installations would be uneconomical.

Ndiyo Terminals

The locations chosen were part of the network of Community Phone Shops created by MTN, the local mobile phone operator. MTN also provided much of the hardware for this installation, and will help oversee its ongoing development.

Please take a look at the following three-minute video clip for more information about the project.

If this embedded video doesn't work for you, you can download a copy to your local machine. You will need the free Quicktime Player or the Open Source VLC Media Player to view it.

  • Very small (3MB) - good for slow connections
  • Medium (6MB) - for reasonable broadband connections
  • Large (15MB) - for fast connections
As an alternative, we offer an MPEG-4 version:
  • Largish (13MB) - for those unable to play the above formats
A spectator