Access to data and the internet remains a challenge for the vast majority of South Africans, who often struggle to afford the fees charged by most of South Africa’s ISPs and mobile phone operators.

TooMuchWifi (TMW) emerged in 2016 to challenge this reality, starting in the Western Cape province. The company initially set off as a hot spot provider, but grew to be an ISP that had fixed lines. It now has a customer base of 400,000 clients across the greater Cape Town metropolitan area.

The company’s philosophy is not to just work for communities but to work with them. In line with its social enterprise philosophy, TooMuchWifi commits 30% of all revenue generated within a community back to that same community, through the TEAMS social impact initiative. TEAMS seeks to address five key community needs: Technology access and literacy, education opportunities, employment creation, nutrition programmes and safety initiatives. Through this comprehensive approach, TooMuchWifi aims to turn its business model into a catalyst for more meaningful community development.

Today, TooMuchWifi faces a unique challenge: effectively communicating that they are more than their core service. The company wants to position itself as a caring brand that demonstrates tangible, measurable impact in served communities, and moving beyond simply listing programmes to showing transformative results.

This challenge involves working with community-based organisations and NGOs, empowering them to implement programmes through the TEAMS framework, and creating space for authentic community voices to tell their own stories. The company recognises that the most powerful testimonials won’t come from corporate communications, but from the communities themselves—from students accessing online education, entrepreneurs building digital businesses, families feeling safer through community networks, and organisations expanding their reach through reliable connectivity. To achieve this, TMW may as well need to design and implement a tailored monitoring and evaluation tool that specifically assesses the social and economic impact of its initiatives across the townships where it operates.

The longer term focus of TooMuchWifi remains on authenticity and impact. In the words of newly appointed Director of Community Engagement, Zandile Ciko, the company wants communities to identify with them as a genuine social impact brand, where the narrative shifts from corporate messaging to community-led storytelling about real transformation.

Combining affordable, reliable internet access with genuine community investment can be transformative for communities that lack access to data, and potentially create pathways out of poverty, bridges to education, platforms for entrepreneurship, and networks that strengthen entire communities.