In recent years, immense effort has been channelled towards the Information and Technological development of rural areas. To support this development, telecommunication networks have been deployed. The availability of these telecommunication networks is expected to improve the way people share ideas and communicate locally and globally, reducing limiting factors like distance through the use of the Internet. The major problem for these networks is that very few of them have managed to stay in operation over long periods of time. One of the major causes of this failure is the lack of proper monitoring and management as, in some cases, administrators are located far away from the network site. Other factors that contribute to the frequent failure of these networks are lack of proper infrastructure, lack of a constant power supply and other environmental issues. A telecommunication network was deployed for the people of Dwesa by the Siyakhula Living Lab project. During this research project, frequent visits were made to the site and network users were informally interviewed in order to gain insight into the network challenges. Based on the challenges, different network monitoring systems and other solutions were deployed on the network. This thesis analyses the problems encountered and presents possible and affordable solutions that were implemented on the network. This was done to improve the network‟s reliability, availability and manageability whilst exploring possible and practical ways in which the connectivity of the deployed telecommunication network can be maintained. As part of these solutions, a GPRS redundant link, Nagios and Cacti monitoring systems as well as Simple backup systems were deployed. v Acronyms AC Access Concentrators AMANDA Automatic Marylyn Network Disk Archiver CDMA Code Divison Multiple Access CGI Common Gateway Interface.

Computer networks are in the scope of the IEEE organization normalized by the 802 board which currently comprises six working groups for wireless communications. IEEE 802.11 for wireless local area networks, IEEE  802.15 for wireless personal area networks, IEEE 802.16 for wireless metropolitan area networks, IEEE 802.20 for mobile broadband wireless access, IEEE 802.21 for media independent handover and IEEE 802.22 for wireless regional area networks. This master's thesis focuses on a security analysis of particular standards, describes threats, vulnerabilities, current security measures and mutually compares wireless specifications from a security point of view. The conclusion is devoted to overall evaluation of the project, to its contributions, possible enhancements and continuation in the form of consequential studies.