CC image courtesy of Dolores Coullie.
The service offered to smartphone users has been made available from this morning by local wireless specialist Connected Space.
Ryan de Kock, technical manager at Connected Space, said: “We are committed to providing the best network and user friendly experience to those using the free service and hope that in time this initiative can grow.”
Users near hotspots in the Company Gardens are able to use 100MB of data per day.
Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana, chief executive officer at Cape Town partnership, explained the area was selected as “the green heartbeat of our city and a space that is being used more and more for leisure, art, installations and community experiences”.
She said: “Our commitment at The Cape Town Partnership is to unlock the city for more people and this means making the most of our public spaces; the spaces in between that define a city by its people and their experiences.”
The project is an initiative enabled by partnerships between The City of Cape Town, The Cape Town Partnership, Connected Space, Iziko Museum’s Company’s Garden and City Parks.
Not the last, this first free offering through the collaboration intends to expand on the base of further wireless accessibility in the rest of Cape Town’s city centre.
Garden visitors will be able to learn more about surrounding trees by scanning Quick Reference (QR) codes on trees for more information found on attached labels.
Translation links also enable tree scanners to read the information in their own language.
The project is part of a greening strategy, open for marketing to the promotion of similar local ventures.