Dr. David Johnson

David has been working for the past 15 years carrying out research and deployments on technologies that have the potential to provide access to poorly connected regions or areas which lack affordable internet access. The philosophy underpinning David’s work is developing decentralized network technology and policies and regulation that enable communities and individuals to own their own network infrastructure and services. David is based in Cape Town, South Africa.

David helped design and build Africa’s first rural wireless mesh network in 2006 and led a number of connectivity projects in the area of small cell, mesh technology and edge-hosted services in Zambia and South Africa. He has also led policy work on broadband expansion and spectrum management for the South African government. He currently has a research grant to explore blockchain mesh networks to incentivize network expansion and building localized cloud technology to encourage local content creation and sharing and improved video streaming performance. These concepts are being trialed in iNethi, a project running in a low-income township at the southern tip of Cape Town that has built a fully community-owned network.

David serves as an adjunct senior lecturer in the Computer Science Department at UCT in the ICT4D lab, a senior research associate at Research ICT Africa and a consultant for the The Vernonburg Group in Washington D.C. He was previously a principal researcher in the Networks and Media group of the CSIR Meraka Institute in South Africa and an IT Policy fellow at the Centre for Information and Technology at Princeton University. He has published 70 articles in the general area of wireless connectivity and ICT for development and a book on TV White space technology. David earned a B.Eng in Electronic Engineering from University of Cape Town. He completed his M.Eng in Computer Engineering at University of Pretoria and a M.Sc and Ph.D in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Barbara on Internet architectures for rural developing regions.