Theres nothing wrong with the devices. The tablets work. The routers blink. The software loads eventually. The real bottleneck? Its the invisible moment after someone clicks sync or presses play and nothing happens.
In South Africa, bandwidth can turn into a bottleneck disguised as progress.
Thats why some engineers are reviving something older than the cloud: edge caching. Local servers. Low-power storage units. Content kept where its actually needed.
Because the smartest networks now arent the ones reaching further theyre the ones reaching inward.
At one Gauteng high school, a network technician recently installed a Raspberry Pi cluster running open-source caching tools. A week later: