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The Minister of Higher Education and Training has approved a grant of R28 million to partially fund internet access networks for rural campuses. This follows a request for funding by Higher Education South Africa (HESA) and the Tertiary Education Network of South Africa (TENET) to further extend points of presence on the existing network backbone to strengthen universities research and teaching capabilities. It is significant as a contributing factor to enable the university sector to fully access knowledge networks and provide the high speed bandwidth necessary for knowledge generation.

The strategic significance of being able to fund this project is central to the mandate of higher education institutions. The capacity of universities to conduct research is of great importance to each university as it allows each university to have all its campuses connected at sufficiently high bandwidths. This enables: shared production and distribution of teaching and learning materials; the deployment of centralized administrative systems and processes for the efficient management of multi-campus institutions; access to high performance scientific computing facilities and other educational and research resources via the existing backbone; and equitable internet access to other research and education networks globally.

The first phase of this project was funded by the Department of Science and Technology for a three year period ending 31 March 2010. It delivered a national backbone network connecting seven major cities and towns to a high speed (10 gigabytes per second) network, providing 70 university and research campuses with high speed connection of at least 1 gigabit per second to points of presence on the high speed backbone. This phase of the project also delivered optical fiber metropolitan access network in Johannesburg that interconnects seven different campuses of the University of Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand; high speed connection from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) satellite application centre at Haretbeesthoek to the CSIR main campus and the Wits main campus and optical fiber access networks in Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria.

The full rollout of the project was compromised by not being extendable to the majority of South Africa's remote and rural higher education campuses, essentially due to network coverage limitations caused by a lack of adequate funding for the project.

Nearly all university and research campuses that lie outside the seven cities have as an interim arrangement gained access to the existing backbone by means of rented circuits that have proven to be costly and unsustainable. By being able to provide additional funding toward the completion and extension of this network coverage, there will be enormous benefit to institutions that are not able to connect to the network or who are not able to connect at sufficiently high speed.

With the financial assistance from the Department of Higher Education and Training, the second phase of the project will see the backbone network being extended to points of presence in Grahamstown, Makhado, Middleburg Nelspruit, Pietermaritzburg, Polokwane, Potschefstroom, Vanderbijl Park and Witbank while TENET will secure at least 50 rural campuses to these points of presence.

A Steering Committee has been tasked with the monitoring of the grant.