Sector explainer · Communities and rural

Connectivity and sensing, locally owned.

Community networks, Indigenous and remote connectivity, interim public-safety broadband and remote microgrids.

Scenarios

5

Templates

5

Open projects

6

Bands compared

6

01 · Community cellular

Link budget

Free space sets the ceiling. Terrain sets the floor.

Unused 800 MHz and 1900 MHz spectrum through an access-licensing framework with a priority window for Indigenous applicants. Low band carries farther: free-space loss grows with 20·log₁₀ of frequency, so 800 MHz reaches about 2.4 times as far as 1900 MHz for the same link budget. The red cells are where a handset 1.5 m above ground both sees the tower and sits inside the budgeted range.

Band

Free-space range

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Ground in sight and in range

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Farthest covered cell

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02 · Fixed wireless

Fresnel zone

A clear line is wider than a line.

Sub-grantee partnerships where observatory nodes co-host at schools, clinics and fire halls. Each point-to-multipoint link needs more than sight: its first Fresnel zone, r = 17.32·√(d ÷ 4f) metres at mid-path for d in km and f in GHz, must stay at least 60 % clear of trees, roofs and terrain.

Frequency

First Fresnel zone at mid-path

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Clearance needed (60 %)

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Earth bulge at mid-path, k = 4/3

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03 · Rural and cross-border corridors

Corridor plan

A corridor is counted in sites per kilometre.

Co-funded cross-border sections under European digital infrastructure calls. Along a road the plan is linear: sites every s kilometres, n = ⌈L ÷ s⌉ + 1, and a vehicle hands over every s ÷ v hours. Shorter spacing buys capacity and reliability; longer spacing buys cost.

Sites

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Handovers per vehicle trip

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Time in each cell

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04 · Remote microgrid

Energy sizing

Size the array from the load, not the brochure.

Solar-plus-storage telemetry with a weather station and a small cell in a diesel-reduction project. A first pass is arithmetic: array kWp = daily load ÷ (peak sun hours × 0.75 system yield), storage kWh = daily load × days of autonomy ÷ (0.8 depth of discharge × 0.92 round-trip efficiency). The weather station on the same record then shows how the site really performs.

Solar array

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Battery storage

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Diesel avoided a year, at 3 kWh per litre

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05 · Interim public-safety broadband

Band choice

Where no national network exists, bring one.

Private LTE or 5G for fire and medical services in territories without a national public-safety network. Band choice decides how many sites the territory needs. For the same link budget, range scales with 1 ÷ f, so the site count over an area scales with f²: the difference between low band and mid-band is counted in towers, not percentages.

Low band

Mid band

Free-space loss, low band

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Free-space loss, mid band

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Extra loss at mid band

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Sites needed, mid band vs low band

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06 · Proof

Evidence

What a community asks to see.

Community networks are judged on coverage they can show the regulator and ownership they can show their members. Each item below is produced by the grid as a record while it runs.

• 01Coverage maps in the regulator’s format
• 02Speed-test evidence
• 03Uptime
• 04Local ownership and benefit agreements
• 05Indigenous data-governance alignment
• 06Licence status

community network

Indigenous-owned ISP

Universal Broadband Fund

BEAD sub-grantee

fixed wireless access

CBRS

LEO backhaul

last-mile

remote microgrid monitoring

Open work in the field: LibreMesh and LibreRouter, Open5GS, Magma, Meshtastic, The Things Network and ChirpStack, Althea.