In this study, the authors propose a hybrid power line communication (PLC)/visible light communication (VLC)/radio frequency (RF) fronthaul with a fibre-based wired backhaul system to support massive number of smart devices (SDs). Since a signal-to-noise ratio-based access point (AP) association and bandwidth (BW) allocation for each SD do not necessarily improve the system capacity, they propose novel and efficient AP association and BW allocation strategies to maximise the sum rate capacity (SRC) of the hybrid system under consideration. An optimisation problem is formulated for the SRC with the AP association and BW allocation as the optimisation parameters and a hierarchical decomposition method is used to convert the non-linear optimisation problem into a set of convex optimisation problems. Then, the proposed strategies are used to solve the optimisation problem in an iterative manner until the SRC converges to an optimal value. Further, an analytical approximation for the BW allocated to each SD for a given AP association is derived using the Lagrangian multiplier method. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated through extensive numerical results. Moreover, the effect of the increased number of SDs on the optimal SRC is analysed. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2019.