Masibambisane High in Delft gets Cape Town's first school Wi-Fi link

Masibambisane High School in Delft has become the first school in Cape Town to receive the City’s new free Wi-Fi infrastructure, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis announced on 18 September 2026.

The school sits in one of the city’s larger and younger communities on the eastern side of the metro, where household budgets are tight and a learner’s internet access often depends on whether there is airtime left at the end of the month. The new infrastructure puts the connection inside the school grounds, so the data cost stops sitting with the family.

As CapeTown ETC reported on 18 September, the school is the first of several expected to benefit as the programme expands. Hill-Lewis said the rollout is intended to connect more learners across the city, and that access to technology and the opportunities it creates should not be determined by a learner’s background.

We believe every child in Cape Town deserves the best, no matter your background.

The mayor said more schools are coming. The City has not published the full list of schools in line, or the dates on which each will be connected.

Why the school gate is the right place to start

Cape Town has been building public Wi-Fi in communities for years, at libraries, clinics and public spaces. Putting it into a school adds a different kind of reach. A learner who cannot study at home in the evening can do the work in the school day, on a device the school controls, with a teacher nearby.

That is not a small thing in a metro where the gap between schools is often a gap in connectivity. A school with reliable Wi-Fi can run the online assessment platforms, the digital textbooks and the research tasks that the national curriculum increasingly assumes are available. A school without it sets those tasks anyway, and the learner absorbs the difference.

Masibambisane High is a no-fee public school in Delft. Its learners are drawn from households where a home fibre line or a monthly data bundle is not a given. The point of a school connection is that it does not depend on either.

What the state did, and what it still has to publish

The announcement is the City of Cape Town’s, made by the mayor, and it is a working commitment rather than a plan on paper. One school is connected. The City says the programme continues.

The questions a parent in Delft will reasonably ask are the ones the announcement did not answer. Which schools are next, in what order, and by when. Whether the connection is filtered and monitored, as a school network carrying minors should be. Whether the school has the devices and the load-shedding backup to use the link it now has, because a Wi-Fi signal does not survive a power cut on its own. And whether the monthly line cost is carried by the City for the long term, or only for as long as the current budget cycle runs.

Those are not objections to the project. They are the terms on which it will either hold or quietly lapse, and they are answerable with a schedule and a budget line.

The Enquirer has asked the City of Cape Town for the rollout schedule, the funding arrangement and the network safeguards in place at Masibambisane High.

What it means for a learner in Delft

The concrete effect is straightforward. A learner at Masibambisane High can now open a research page, submit an assignment or work through a practice paper on the school network without spending a cent of a family’s data.

For a household choosing between electricity, transport and airtime in the same week, that is the difference between a task done and a task missed. It is also the first school in the metro to have it, which means the rest of Cape Town now has a working example to measure the promise against.

The next dated step is the City’s own: the second school, and the schedule that says when.