Digital City Strategy
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means
Cape Town's Digital City Strategy, adopted around 2016, organises the city's digital push around four pillars — digital economy, infrastructure, government and inclusion. Its backbone is a municipally owned open-access fibre network: roughly 848km of cable connecting 346+ city buildings at up to 1Gbps, plus more than 400 free public WiFi zones extending cheap internet across the metro.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →📊 Impact
≈848km municipal open-access fibre; 346+ city buildings connected at up to 1Gbps; 400+ free public WiFi zones serving roughly 200,000 users a month.
🎓 Lesson
Cape Town treats its fibre as open-access public infrastructure, wholesaling spare capacity to private ISPs rather than selling broadband to residents directly.
Sources
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Digital City Strategy” — Cape Town, South Africa. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/cape-town-digital/ (last verified 2026-07-19). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.