There’s Node place like Zanzibar

I’d been fortunate to meet most of the leadership team at a Crypto AM event in London in February so I put a call in to Andrew to see if anything could be arranged. I was conscious that the team was very busy but he was more than happy to put me in touch with Robin, the Network Country Manager.

I arranged to meet Robin and RJ for a quick spot of lunch before having a tour of the office to meet the team and chat about progress. Obviously we all know what has been achieved since June but at that time the team were fully focussed on the deployment of the network in Stone Town and further afield. This involved everything from the building of location maps , recruitment of sites and staff, testing different equipment and of course we know about dealing with regulators.

After a quick tour of the office, including the server room and monitoring tools we headed out for a trip around Stone Town. I’d already spotted my first AirNodes from the office window but first stop was the fish market and Charles’ AirNdoe which is a picture that will go down in World Mobile folklore. However with Robin in charge of Health and Safety he left me in no doubt that I wouldn’t be recreating the scene. From there we headed into the heart of Stone Town. The coverage was nowhere near as comprehensive as now but nevertheless there were plenty of AirNodes visible. The local fort hadn’t been connected yet but the poles were up and we know they were soon home to a number of nodes. I connected at a number of points throughout the town and speeds were impressive and I can only imagine things have got better as the team utilised data from each node to adjust bandwidth depending on usage.