South African Athorities Hate Digital Inclusion: Confiscate Equipment from Village Telco.

I just received word from my colleague, Vickram Crishna, over at the Village Telco project that South African athorities have confiscated their wireless equipment. Apparently, digital inclusion work is so threatening to their regulatory agency and telecom incumbent that they're more than willing to use police force to stop the spread of connectivity. Here's what Vickram says:

Tragically, yesterday the South African regulatory agency ICASA confiscated (without warrant or notice) equipment being used by the Mesh Potato project in its Village Telco implementation. The excuse (given verbally on the telephone) was illegal use of wireless equipment, against which the local telco (named Telkom) had filed a complaint on grounds of wireless interference.

It appears from discussions on the Village Telco list (at Googlegroups) that the ISM band in South Africa is still not free-to-use, and also that licensed wireless networks (but not WISPs) must not allow their signals to cross roads (al la Canute?). However, in this case, Village Telco evidently has the requisite WISP license, so one must view the situation with some gloom.