Stellenbosch’s decade-old free Wi-Fi tested

Stellenbosch’s big plan to offer free Wi-Fi to all its residents over a decade ago has not come to fruition, but there is a slow public network available in a handful of locations.

The Western Cape town’s municipality was among the first in South Africa to announce plans to roll out a free public Wi-Fi network in February 2012.

The initiative involved the municipality, then-popular chat platform Mxit, and the University of Stellenbosch.

Non-profit Project Isizwe was also said to be involved at one point, although it denied this.

The municipality’s ambitious goal was to cover the entire town’s population with free Wi-Fi connectivity within six months.

At the time, mayor Conrad Sidego, the first to lead the municipality with an outright DA majority to back him up, said the aim was to make Stellenbosch South Africa’s first “Wi-Fi town”.

The municipality’s then-head of finance, Pieter Venter, said the network would reach as far as Franschhoek and Pniel.

However, by November 2012, it was apparent the project faced numerous challenges, with only a tiny part of the planned network completed.

Several stakeholders told MyBroadband that virtually no progress had been made on the project’s rollout.

By May 2014, the project was effectively dead, with no drive to achieve the initial rollout targets.

There have been no further updates about the project since that time.

Fast-forward to 2023, and the network is limited to just 42 access points spread across 21 municipal-owned buildings and spaces.

However, according to the municipality’s head of communications, Stuart Grobbelaar, the network was frequently used by visitors to its facilities.

For example, over the weekend of 7–9 September 2023, 21,696 users accessed the network, working out to an average of 7,323 per day.

They downloaded a combined 448.2GB of data during that period and uploaded 34.5GB.

“Special mention must be made that there are multiple devices that use well over 1GB whilst connected,” said Grobbelaar.

Grobbelaar said the average speed was “anything between 2Mbps to 10Mbps” when asked about the type of performance users could expect.

MyBroadband put the network to the test at several sites and got mixed results.

Our first stop was Kayamandi Library, where the signal could be best described as “temperamental”.

The highest download speed we recorded was 1.51Mbps, and the highest upload speed was 6.74Mbps.

Out of 27 speed tests, the average download speed was 0.43Mbps and the average upload 1.08Mbps.

Not reflected in the speed tests is that we had no problems sending and receiving WhatsApp messages, even if connecting to websites sometimes failed and our test device reported “No connection” on the Wi-Fi network.

We tested the network using Huawei, Oppo, and Samsung smartphones, ensuring that mobile data was disabled while connected to the Wi-Fi.

However, due to how flaky the connection was, we couldn’t draw conclusions about the impact of using different makes and models of devices.

All the tests except one recorded latency below 30ms, with one dropping as low as 17ms.

We also tried to use the Wi-Fi hotspot at Ida’s Valley Sports Grounds, but the network was offline at this location due to load-shedding.

A resident who was at the facility described the free Wi-Fi experience as “smooth” and “fast”, saying he had no issues with it when the power was on.

However, we could not confirm whether he was talking about Stellenbosch’s free Wi-Fi service or the Western Cape government’s.

The provincial government has also rolled out a massive network with over 1,600 hotspots in collaboration with Liquid Telecom.

Its coverage zones include some of the same areas that the municipality’s network is available.

Hotspots at the Stellenbosch Driving Licence Testing Denter, the Ida’s Valley Library, and the Stellenbosch Municipality main building were also all offline due to load-shedding.

However, in the CBD, many people were using the Eikestad Mall free Wi-Fi, which extends a block beyond the mall to the parks and recreation areas near the municipal buildings.

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