Diesel per megabit: how Eskom rewrote a Cape Town ISP's price list

The R1,100 gap in one company's price list

In October 2024, a household in Cape Town's Table View corridor shopping with Hitech Fibre could buy a 30 Mbps wireless connection for R1,599 a month, plus R1,999 for a dish, pole, bracket, cabling and labour. In July 2026, the same storefront sells a 50 Mbps connection on the company's own fibre for R499 a month. Faster line, a third of the price, twenty-one months apart, one seller. On a per-megabit basis the spread is starker still: roughly R53 per megabit for the 2024 wireless product against under R10 for the 2026 fibre one.

Nothing in radio engineering explains a five-fold difference. Fixed wireless is, if anything, cheaper to deploy per premises than trenched fibre. What explains it is written on a different utility's tariff schedule. Between the two price prints sits the tail of the worst load-shedding cycle in South African history — a 2023 in which the national grid shed load on some 335 days for close to 6,950 hours, by the CSIR's count — plus an electricity price that compounded roughly 59% in four annual steps, and a wholesale diesel litre that broke its 2022 record in May 2026 at R30.30 on the coast. A wireless network carries all of that on its own back: every high site, every relay, every rooftop radio needs its own stored or burned energy the moment the grid drops. A fibre reseller carries almost none of it; the batteries belong to somebody else.

Scale the single-site problem across a small operator's whole footprint and the boardroom version of the question writes itself. A West Coast WISP of Hitech's evident size — a handful of aggregation points and perhaps a dozen relay and rooftop sites threading Parklands, Table View and Blouberg — faced, at the 2023 peak, a monthly power-and-protection burden plausibly in the R40,000-R70,000 range on the inference developed below, against a wireless subscriber base whose entry tier paid R399. Every Stage 6 month, in other words, the first hundred-odd subscriptions in the door existed to buy batteries, fuel and steel for the masts serving everyone else. No line of that appears in any filing, because none is required of a company this size. But the storefront archived itself, month by month, and prices are the one document a business cannot help publishing truthfully.

Techwood Trading (Pty) Ltd — the legal entity behind the Hitech Fibre brand — lived that arithmetic in miniature, and its successive price lists recorded the result with an honesty that no annual report from a private company this size will ever provide. This piece reconstructs the record: who the company is, what the blackout years did to its wireless cost base, why its 2026 storefront is a fibre supermarket with nine other operators' networks on the shelf, and what has to stay true for the current model to keep working.

One licence, two names, and a registry that answers slowly

Start with identity, because in this corner of the market it takes actual reconstruction. The consumer brand is Hitech Fibre, at hitechfibre.co.za, a domain the .za registry shows was created on 12 October 2017 by a registrant recorded simply as "TechwoodTrading". The bare corporate domain, techwoodtrading.co.za, followed on 3 September 2019 under the same registrant, and today serves nothing but a redirect into the consumer storefront. The archived storefront claims a founding in 2015, "to provide home users and corporates with uninterrupted, high speed wireless or fibre internet connectivity" — a sentence in which the word "uninterrupted" would come to do heavy lifting.

The regulator ties the two names together. ICASA's most recent public registers of class licensees — dated May 2020 and, tellingly, never refreshed since — list "Techwood Trading cc t/a HI-TECH Wireless" as the holder of both a class network licence and a class services licence. Those are the standard credentials of a South African WISP: permission to build and operate electronic communications infrastructure and to sell services over it. Note the suffix. In May 2020 Techwood Trading was a close corporation, the small-business vehicle South Africa stopped registering new examples of in 2011. By 3 March 2021, when AFRINIC allocated the company its block of 1,024 IPv4 addresses and its routing number, the registry records name "Techwood Trading (Pty) Ltd." — a private company. The conversion evidently happened in the ten months between those two documents. The Companies and Intellectual Property Commission would settle the date and the directors, but its public search sits behind account registration; queries through the open mirrors that index South African registrations returned nothing for the exact entity. That attempt and its empty result are worth stating plainly, because everything else about the company checks out through independent channels, and the one missing document is the one that would name its owners.

Two more identity wrinkles matter. First, the AFRINIC records put the company's technical contact, one Thomas Brown, at a residential street in Blouberg Rise — the exact suburb cluster (Parklands, Table View, Blouberg) where the June 2021 expansion announcement placed the network, and where the 2026 storefront still concentrates its coverage banner. This is an operator that lives inside its own footprint, which will matter later when the reviews are read. Second, the name is a trap for the unwary. A different "Hitech Wireless" — founded 2010 in Middelburg, Mpumalanga, by the Venter brothers — was acquired by Herotel during that consolidator's national WISP roll-up, and its old domain now redirects to Herotel. The Cape Town Techwood entity was never part of that transaction; it kept its licences, its brand slid from "Hi-Tech Wireless" toward "Hitech Fibre", and the two businesses share nothing but a generic name. Any directory that conflates them inherits a thousand kilometres of error.

So the reconciled picture: one small Cape Town company, founded mid-2010s as a close corporation, licensed as a WISP under a wireless trading name, converted to a private company around 2020-21, now trading to consumers as Hitech Fibre while its legal name persists in the routing system, the licence registers and both domain registrations. The directory listing under Techwood Trading, with techwoodtrading.co.za as its domain evidence, matches the legal spine of that chain.

What a megabit cost when the lights went out

To read the company's price lists properly, put the national numbers beside them. The regulator granted Eskom an 18.65% tariff increase from April 2023 and 12.74% from April 2024, then another 12.74% from April 2025 — taking the standard tariff to 220.92 cents per kilowatt-hour — with 5.36% following in April 2026. Compounded, grid electricity cost roughly 59% more in mid-2026 than it had four years earlier. That is the good case: the price you pay when the grid is actually on.

When it was off, the meter changed currency. Eskom's own schedule arithmetic has Stage 6 shedding a given area twelve times over four days — six two-hour and six four-hour blocks, an average of nine hours of darkness per day. Through 2022 and 2023 the large mobile operators published what surviving that regime cost at scale, and their numbers are the best public calibration for what a wireless site really burns. MTN South Africa booked a R695 million knock to 2022 earnings from load-shedding and committed R1.5 billion to batteries, generators and site security. Vodacom disclosed that across its 9,550-plus towers, grid availability averaged about 67% — a third of its network off grid power at any moment — and that it had spent more than R4 billion on backup power since 2020, with sector-wide diesel spend for 2023 projected around R1.1 billion. Those disclosures also recorded the second-order tax: batteries that are cycled daily die years early, and batteries that work become the most stolen object in South African infrastructure, which is why so much of the "power" budget was actually spent on steel cages, alarms and guards.

A ten-person WISP faces the identical physics with none of the procurement leverage. Its high sites sit on rooftops, water towers and hills precisely because they are prominent, which makes them exposed. Its per-site load is small — a few hundred watts of radios and switching — but a small operator pays retail for lithium, retail for security, and the full wholesale list price for diesel published monthly by the state, a price that hit its then-record R25.53 a litre in July 2022, in the middle of the worst shedding. And unlike Vodacom, a WISP cannot average the pain across nine thousand sites and three revenue streams. Every dead high site is a specific set of paying households offline, phoning one support number.

Now watch the price lists respond. In June 2021, Hitech Fibre's published home wireless table read R399 for 5 Mbps, R550 for 10, R800 for 30, router R450 once-off. By October 2024 the wireless page read R499 for 5, R699 for 10, R999 for 15, R1,299 for 20, R1,599 for 30 — increases of 25% to 100% per tier — plus that R1,999 standard installation. Over the same interval the company's fibre tiers barely moved, and its 2026 own-network fibre list starts at R150 for a 5 Mbps line and R299 for 20 Mbps. Consumer price inflation cannot produce a doubling of one product's price while its substitute at the same counter gets cheaper. A structural cost input specific to wireless can, and between 2021 and 2024 there was exactly one candidate: the cost of keeping self-powered radio infrastructure alive through the deepest load-shedding on record, at compounding grid tariffs and record diesel, with theft exposure priced in. The 2024 wireless page carries one more suggestive trace: its pricing block is headed "Home Wireless Evernet Pricing" — Evernet being a neighbouring Western Cape wireless operator — which reads like a company that had begun sourcing even its wireless product from someone else's towers rather than feeding its own. That inference rests on a single archived page and should be treated accordingly; but either reading, resale or retreat, points the same direction.

The arithmetic of one high site

Here is the unit arithmetic assembled explicitly, with the evidence separated from the inference. The evidence: Stage 6 removes grid power for an average of about nine hours a day on Eskom's published pattern; wholesale diesel listed at R25.53 a litre in July 2022 and R30.30 coastal in May 2026 on the official schedule; grid energy at 220.92 c/kWh on the 2025/26 regulated tariff; and the company's own published subscription prices at each date. The inference, flagged as such: the load and equipment assumptions that follow are standard WISP engineering ranges, not Techwood documents, because no operator this size publishes a bill of materials.

Assume a modest high site drawing 300 watts for radios, a switch and conversion losses. Nine dark hours a day is 2.7 kWh of stored energy daily — before grid charging, a trivial R6 a day at the regulated tariff. Energy was never the cost. The cost is the machinery of autonomy. A lithium bank sized to deliver that comfortably, with headroom for back-to-back four-hour blocks, runs to R25,000-R40,000 installed at small-operator retail; cycled deeply every day of a 335-day shedding year, its calendar life compresses toward two years, which amortises to roughly R1,200-R1,700 a month. Sites that could not be battery-carried — the core aggregation points — needed generator top-up: a small petrol or diesel set burning around a litre an hour, run even three hours a day through a Stage 6 month, is 90-odd litres, R2,300-R2,700 at 2022-23 prices, plus the labour of someone driving fuel to a rooftop, plus the near-certainty of eventually feeding the theft economy that the listed operators budgeted steel cages against. Call the all-in power-and-protection burden of one contested high site R3,000-R6,000 a month at the peak of the crisis. That range is inference; every input feeding it is documented.

Set that against the revenue side, which is not inference: it is the company's own tariff table. At the June 2021 price of R550 for 10 Mbps, a high site serving thirty households grossed R16,500 a month; a R4,500 power-and-security burden would consume 27% of it — before backhaul, before the technician's bakkie, before the radios themselves. The October 2024 reprice moves the same thirty households to R20,970 at the new R699 tier, clawing back roughly the whole power burden — which is to say, the 2024 wireless price list is the diesel bill, passed through almost rand for rand. And the tiers above it (R1,299 for 20 Mbps, R1,599 for 30) price the heavier users' share of the same fixed autonomy cost. Meanwhile the fibre lines on the same storefront could hold or cut prices because the equivalent burden sits with the fibre network operator — spread across thousands of customers per powered node, at corporate procurement prices, in a city that was shielding its residents from up to two stages of national shedding with its 180 MW Steenbras pumped-hydro scheme. Cape Town's municipal buffer — often one to two stages below the Eskom-direct areas — is a genuine locational subsidy to every fixed-line operator in the metro, and Techwood's West Coast footprint sits inside it.

The conclusion of the arithmetic is not subtle. For a small operator in 2022-24, a wireless megabit carried a power surcharge that a fibre megabit simply did not. The company's two price lists measure that surcharge at roughly R40 per megabit at the 30 Mbps tier — the R1,599 wireless line against its own sub-R500 fibre equivalents. Diesel per megabit was never a metaphor; it was a line item, and Techwood's storefront printed it.

What the company sells now

The 2026 storefront shows what a rational small operator does after running that arithmetic: it becomes a shop rather than a power utility. The live signup page at hitechfibre.co.za carries, embedded in its own code, a working price book of 74 tariffs. A handful ride the company's own network — branded Hitech and Hitech24, from R150 for 5 Mbps to R1,339 for 300 Mbps, with dedicated "Estates" tiers at R429-R989 — and the rest resell nine other operators' fibre: Openserve, Octotel, Vuma, MetroFibre, Frogfoot, Evotel, Comtel, FibreGeeks and a smaller local network, at retail prices from R378 to R1,622. There is even a carrier-grade rung: a 1 Gbps symmetrical business line at R11,500 a month, and a Frogfoot-based 1 Gbps "lite" at R5,750. The storefront claims coverage of 10,000-plus homes and businesses — a company-sourced figure with no independent confirmation, and "covered" is not "subscribed"; treat it as marketing perimeter, not customer count.

The price book rewards close reading, because it quietly answers the assignment's own question about what Techwood Trading actually is. This is not a trading company with an ISP sideline; the March 2025 services page shows the opposite hybrid — an ISP that has bolted on the adjacent trades a Cape Flats-to-West-Coast small business can cross-sell: VoIP phone systems, IT support, CCTV and electric fencing, under the banner "Hitech Fibre Group". Security installations are a natural companion sale for a company that spent the blackout years learning perimeter protection on its own infrastructure. There is no public evidence of a goods-trading arm; the "Trading" in the legal name reads as a relic of a 2010s close-corporation registration, not a description of commerce.

Two corners of the tariff sheet carry the social geography of the footprint. A capped R90-a-month, 50-gigabyte line at 1 Mbps exists for a single named affordable-housing development, and three "social dev" tiers — R399 for symmetrical 25 Mbps, R449 for 50 — are restricted to the Pioneer Valley area on the FibreGeeks open-access network, which builds in exactly the lower-income pockets that border Parklands. These are the tariffs the assignment's framing worried about: price points that cannot absorb a diesel shock. The reseller structure is what makes them possible at all — the FNO carries the power risk, the ISP carries only the support call. On its own towers in 2024, Techwood's cheapest wireless line was R499 for a fifth of the speed.

The customer terms complete the commercial picture. The subscriber agreement is a loan-equipment model — the router stays Hitech property, with a R2,950 fee if it is not returned — on month-to-month, 6, 12 or 18-month terms, early cancellation owing the remainder. And clause 3(b) says the quiet part in contract language: the subscriber acknowledges that Hitech "has contracted with communications and network operators for internet access" and can only deliver service to the extent those operators deliver to it. The dependency that used to be a diesel drum on a rooftop is now a paragraph shifting upstream risk to nine wholesale suppliers.

Where the margin lives now

The 74-line price book also lets an outsider triangulate the revenue logic without seeing a single invoice, because the same speed is priced several ways on the same page. Fifty megabits on the company's own network costs R499. Fifty megabits delivered over Openserve's wholesale "lite" product costs R649; over Vuma, R685; sixty over Frogfoot, R747; fifty-five over Octotel, R680. The R150-R250 spread between the own-network line and every wholesale line is the most informative number the company publishes. On a resold line, most of the retail price flows through to the network operator as the wholesale access fee, leaving the ISP a service margin that industry convention puts in the low hundreds of rand — enough to fund support, billing and a contribution to bandwidth, and nothing else. On the own-network line, the entire R499 stays in-house against Techwood's own cost stack. That the company prices its own product below every wholesale alternative while presumably keeping more of it says the integrated cost per subscriber is materially lower — and it doubles as a routing signal to customers: wherever both options pass your door, take mine.

The rest of the cost base is visible in outline if not in figures. Bandwidth: transit from two upstreams plus free peering — the smallest line, as the next section shows. Facilities: rack space in two Teraco campuses, the one genuinely corporate expense on the sheet, partially offset by what free exchange ports save in transit. Software: the storefront visibly runs on a commercial subscriber-management and billing platform, a per-customer licence cost that scales gently. Labour: the support desk answered on weekends and public holidays, per the reviews, plus installation crews whose R1,999 wireless call-out and per-visit fees are designed to make truck rolls self-funding. Equipment: routers financed on the loan model, with the R2,950 unreturned-equipment fee as the backstop, and every device priced in dollars against a rand the company cannot hedge. What is absent from the 2026 cost base is the item this article began with: a fleet of self-powered high sites. The company's structural achievement of the decade was moving diesel off its own sheet and onto its suppliers' — at the price, examined below, of no longer controlling the thing its customers pay it for.

Revenue mix, then, in descending confidence: consumer fibre subscriptions across ten networks (evidenced directly by the price book); estate and complex contracts at a visible premium (evidenced by the dedicated tariffs and the named-development coverage list); business connectivity, VoIP and managed services (evidenced by the storefront's business tier and the R5,750-R11,500 carrier lines); and the security-installation trade — CCTV, electric fencing — that shares the group brand (evidenced by the archived services page, volume unknown). A reasonable sketch of a business this shape puts monthly recurring revenue in the very low millions of rand at a few thousand subscribers — a sketch, it must be said plainly, that is inference from tariffs and footprint, not any disclosed figure.

The cheapest line on the cost sheet is peering

For a company this size, the network evidence is unusually solid, and it shows the one input cost Techwood has genuinely engineered down: getting traffic to and from the world. Since March 2021 the company has run its own routing domain, AS328810, originating its 1,024 AFRINIC-allocated addresses, with upstream connectivity led by Network Platforms — a Johannesburg wholesale aggregator; Techwood's second registry contact sits at a Bedfordview address consistent with that upstream also helping run the routing — and by Hurricane Electric for international reach. More importantly, its PeeringDB entry shows ports at four exchange points: 10 Gbps at NAPAfrica in both Johannesburg and Cape Town, and 1 Gbps at the community exchanges JINX and CINX, from racks in Teraco's CT1 and Johannesburg campuses. NAPAfrica charges nothing — no port, membership or cross-connect fees — for peering that reaches 650-odd networks, which for a Cape ISP means Netflix caches, Google, Cloudflare and the banks a few free gigabits away. The entry self-describes as a network service provider moving 5-10 Gbps, mostly inbound: the classic shape of a consumer eyeball network.

Read against the cost story, the peering posture is the mirror image of the diesel story. Power was a cost the company could not scale away, so it shed the asset that incurred it; transit is a cost that free public peering does scale away, so the company invested there — real ports, real racks, its own address space, the paperwork of a licensed operator. That asymmetry is the whole strategic lesson of the South African small-ISP decade: the inputs that reward being small and local (support, installation, community presence) and the inputs that punish it (energy autonomy, site security) sorted operators into those who sold out to consolidators like Herotel and those who, like Techwood, restructured around other people's physical networks while keeping their own routing identity. Ports at four exchanges is also a mild over-build for a ten-person shop — the kind of infrastructure a company installs if it intends to sell wholesale or white-label service to other small ISPs, which its carrier-tier price lines hint at. That remains conjecture; the ports are fact.

The residual power exposure has not vanished — it has been repriced as counterparty risk. Octotel's status history documents the fibre breaks and node outages that now determine whether a Hitech customer in Parklands is online, and the roughly four hours of battery at a typical FNO node is a number Techwood can neither audit nor extend. When Eskom relapsed to Stage 6 in February 2025 before its recovery held through a projected shedding-free summer, the question for a fibre reseller was no longer "can I fuel my towers" but "did my nine suppliers keep their nodes up" — a better question to have, and a weaker position from which to answer a customer.

Who pays, who leaves, and what leaving costs

The paying base is legible from the tariff names: households in the Parklands-Table View-Blouberg corridor and, increasingly, gated estates and complexes — the coverage popup on the archived site lists a couple of dozen named developments, reaching as far as Somerset West and Wellington, well beyond the home turf. Estates are the best customer a small ISP can hold: a body corporate deal delivers dozens of units through one decision-maker, the "Estates" tariffs carry a visible premium over the equivalent open-market lines (R729 versus R580 for a 40 Mbps tier on the current book), and the switching cost is collective rather than individual. Small businesses take the VoIP, leased-line and managed Wi-Fi layer on top.

For the ordinary open-access household, though, switching costs are low and falling. On an Octotel or Openserve street, a Parklands resident can leave Hitech for Webafrica, Afrihost or Cool Ideas without a truck roll — same line, different bill. Techwood's own reselling of nine networks is the same knife pointed the other way: it can poach any competitor's subscriber just as easily. In that world an ISP's only durable moats are price on its own network — where R499 for 50 Mbps undercuts most national brands on wholesale lines — and the thing the big brands cannot replicate: the owner-operator support radius. The company's whole identity chain (the technical contact living in Blouberg Rise, the reviews naming individual staff, the 021 number answered on weekends) is that moat. Wireless substitutes exist at the margins — rain's 5G products and Herotel's fixed wireless serve the same metro — but for a fibre-passed premises in 2026 they compete on installation speed, not economics.

Churn mechanics therefore differ sharply by segment, and the contract terms show the company managing each with the right tool. Open-access consumers get month-to-month terms because lock-in would lose the sale to a national brand offering the same; the retention instrument is the support radius, not the contract. Own-network and estate customers can be offered 6, 12 and 18-month terms with cancellation owing the balance, because there the company controls the line and the installer relationship, and because a body corporate that has let one provider wire its ducting does not re-tender annually. The wireless-era R1,999 installation fee played the same role in reverse — a sunk cost that made leaving feel expensive — and its disappearance from the fibre-first storefront is itself a small confession that the market's switching costs have collapsed. What holds revenue now is being the ISP whose owner answers on a Saturday, priced R150 below the national brands on its own turf.

Regulatory risk is real but slow-moving. The class-licence regime that authorises Techwood costs little to maintain, but ICASA's public registers have not been refreshed since May 2020, which means the licence's current standing under the converted (Pty) Ltd entity cannot be publicly confirmed — a records gap, most likely, rather than a compliance one, though only the regulator can say. The sharper institutional risks are municipal and criminal rather than regulatory: wayleaves and trenching politics for its own-network expansion, and the metal-theft economy that made every powered cabinet in South Africa a target. The macro risk is the rand itself — every radio, ONT and battery is imported, and the May 2026 diesel reset was a currency-and-Brent event as much as an oil one.

What the reviews are pricing

The unofficial record is thicker than a company this size usually generates, and it points in a consistent direction. On HelloPeter, Hitechfibre holds a 6.1 TrustIndex across 100 reviews stretching back to November 2018 — a genuinely long trail for a micro-ISP, and one that brackets the entire load-shedding era. The texture is owner-operator: five-star reviews thank named individuals, including a "Thomas" who "set everything up within minutes" — the same first name as the technical contact in the registry records, which suggests the man who signs the AFRINIC paperwork still climbs ladders. A January 2026 reviewer reports four years of continuous service; a 2021 reviewer praises the team for "try[ing] their best to keep network up and running", which is what gratitude looked like in the diesel years.

The older strata of the trail date the operation independently of any company claim. A November 2018 five-star review is the earliest independent customer trace; a January 2022 reviewer says they had been a customer "for 5 yrs", pushing observed operations back to about 2017 — the year the consumer domain was registered — and sitting comfortably beside the storefront's own founded-in-2015 statement, which otherwise rests on a single archived page. The 2019-2020 layer contains the sharpest complaints of the whole trail: missed installations, an unreachable secretary, a one-star "worst service" broadside. That was the pre-conversion close-corporation era, before the routing build-out and the fibre pivot, and the trail's tone visibly professionalises after 2021 — the same period in which the company acquired its own address space, joined the exchanges and formalised into a private company. An employer page on a national job board confirms the company hires through formal channels, another small marker of a business that has crossed from hobby-scale to payroll-scale.

Three signals deserve a more analytical read. First, the review cadence: a dense burst of five-star reviews in late January and February 2026 — eleven in a month after years of a trickle — is the signature of a company that started asking happy customers to post. That is ordinary reputation management, but it means the 6.1 index is drifting up on solicitation, not necessarily on changed service. Second, a two-star review from March 2026 complains of "constant network drops if it rains or is super windy" on what the customer believed was a fibre line. Weather does not bend glass; it bends radio links. The likeliest reading is that some customers sold under the fibre-era brand still terminate on wireless infrastructure somewhere in the chain — consistent with the Evernet trace on the 2024 wireless page, and a reminder that brand migration finishes before network migration does. Third, a one-star March 2026 review describes a router that resets and a call-out fee charged to diagnose it: the flip side of the loan-equipment model, where the R2,950 equipment liability and per-visit fees transfer small operational costs to the least happy customers. None of these signals is a fact about the network; each is a hypothesis the company's private monitoring data could settle instantly, and the pattern — solicited praise, weather-correlated drops, fee friction — is what a thin-margin operator under competitive pressure looks like from outside. The storefront's own "4.8 star customer satisfaction" banner against the 6.1-out-of-10 independent index is the usual gap between curated and open feedback channels.

The facts that would move the judgement

The judgement as it stands: Techwood Trading is a verified, licensed, routing-independent micro-ISP that survived the worst infrastructure crisis in its market's history by reading its own cost sheet correctly — repricing wireless to pass the power burden through, then restructuring into an open-access fibre retailer with a genuine own-network core and a free-peering interconnection strategy. It is small, owner-operated, geographically concentrated and dependent on nine wholesale suppliers it cannot control. Several specific facts would change that reading.

A CIPC extract would settle ownership, the conversion date and any director overlap with suppliers or the Evernet-adjacent wireless operators; if it showed outside shareholding or common control with an upstream, the independent-survivor story would need rewriting. A refreshed ICASA register that failed to show the licence under the (Pty) Ltd entity would convert a records gap into a genuine compliance question. Subscriber counts — even a rough figure from the billing system the storefront visibly runs on — would test whether "10,000 covered" translates into the two-to-four thousand connected customers the support cadence suggests; materially fewer would mean the 74-tariff shop is wider than its base justifies. Evidence of who physically owns the "Hitech24" access network — self-built GPON, leased FibreGeeks strands, or rebadged wireless — would determine how much of the margin story is vertical integration and how much is arbitrage. On the macro side, the model's tailwind assumptions are checkable quarter by quarter: Eskom's recovery holding (2025 saw only a dozen shedding days), Cape Town's Steenbras buffer surviving municipal budget politics, and diesel retreating from its May 2026 record. A durable return to multi-stage national shedding would hurt Techwood's FNO suppliers before it hurt Techwood — but a supplier's node outage and a customer's cancelled debit order arrive in the same week. And if the company's carrier-tier lines start filling with other small ISPs' traffic, the correct frame shifts again, from local retailer to boutique wholesale — the last position on the board where a ten-person Cape Town operator holds pricing power.

Evidence register

The identity chain rests on ICASA's May 2020 class ECNS and ECS registers (Techwood Trading cc t/a HI-TECH Wireless), AFRINIC's delegation records (ASN and 1,024 addresses to Techwood Trading (Pty) Ltd, 3 March 2021), and .za registry data for both domains (2017 and 2019, common registrant). Routing and interconnection: bgp.he.net, PeeringDB and NAPAfrica document the prefixes, upstreams, Teraco facilities and free-peering ports. The tariff record is the company's own published pages: the June 2021 wireless table, the October 2024 wireless table, the January 2022 homepage, the customer terms, the March 2025 services page and the live 2026 storefront with its embedded 74-line price book. The power economics rest on Eskom's stage arithmetic, the 18.65% and 12.74% regulated increases, CSIR shedding statistics, official fuel price schedules and the May 2026 diesel reset; MTN and Vodacom disclosures calibrate what powered sites cost at scale, and the Steenbras reporting documents Cape Town's municipal buffer. Market context: Herotel's acquisition of the unrelated Middelburg Hitech, FibreGeeks as the open-access network behind the social tariffs, and Octotel's status history for supplier-side outage exposure. Unofficial signals: the HelloPeter trail and the company's Facebook expansion posts. Where a claim rests on a single archived page — the Evernet trace, the founding-year statement — the text says so.