🛰️ Connectivity (mesh)

Exploring

A few shared internet pipes spread across the commons by a member-owned wireless mesh — cheap, no telecom landlord, and it keeps working even when the outside line drops.

A few pipes, shared by many

Out near Salmo, real internet means a handful of Starlink dishes (or fixed-wireless to a regional tower where there's line-of-sight). The trick isn't the connection — it's sharing it. One $140/month link spread across fifteen or twenty homes by a wireless mesh works out to a few dollars a month per household for genuine broadband. The commons buys a few pipes; everyone drinks.

Terrain is the real challenge

Mountains and trees block radio line-of-sight, so a mesh here needs relay nodes on ridges and high benches, hopping the signal from the backhaul to each neighbourhood. This is where GeoSeal's elevation and aspect data earns its keep again — we plan relay placement by sight-lines — and the relays run on solar, folding into the energy stack.

Hold your connection in common — like the land

This is the most on-brand idea of all. A member-owned mesh means no telecom landlord who can raise the rent or cut you off, and — crucially — a local network that keeps running even if the outside line goes down. We can host Silvanus itself, comms, and local services on the commons, on the mesh. The mesh is to your internet what the trust is to your land: held in common, beyond any landlord's reach — so no hostile party controls your connection.

A commons utility — maybe someone's business

The backbone is a shared utility, but keeping it running is real work — so it could be a member's concession: someone maintains the mesh and bills the commons, the way the foundry or the biochar operation is somebody's living. Community mesh is a proven model — guifi.net in Spain runs tens of thousands of nodes; NYC Mesh and dozens of rural co-op networks do the same. A land commons is the ideal unit to own one.

Connected systems

• ☀️ Solar — The summer workhorse — and an honest reckoning with mountain shading, winter sun angles, and snow.
• 🗺️ Land & Lots — How 2,560 acres becomes 500 surveyed 3-acre cells and a vast permanent commons — cut by buildable envelope, not by ruler.
• ⚡ Energy — Off-grid power from the things this land already has: falling water, summer sun, and wood. Metered on the Energy engine.

Claim a founding share →   ← All systems