Coverage is a spacing problem. Which makes it a furniture problem.
Nobody buys radio infrastructure for a high street. Everybody buys benches. Because each Canopei bench carries two SIMs, a public Wi-Fi lane and a long-range mesh radio, the seating plan and the coverage plan become the same document. That holds in four very different places: a smart-city district being rebuilt, a forty kilometre trail where the risk is a flat battery at dusk, an island nation that cannot buy its way onto an operator's network, and a region with no power and no signal at all. The arithmetic below is the same in each. Only the spacing and the terrain change.
3
Units modelled for full coverage of the smart city district case
Estimated100%
Coverage from the 40 units currently funded in the model
Estimated42,000
People inside the covered footprint at that funding level
EstimatedFour places, one piece of arithmetic.
Smart city district
A district being rebuilt or retrofitted, where the street furniture budget already exists and the connectivity budget is separate. One purchase order does both.
Units funded
40Spacing between units
180 mRange surviving terrain and buildings
16 per cent of clear rangeShadowing is the honest input. A dense city centre cuts an eight kilometre clear path to a few hundred metres. A ridgeline barely touches it. Everything below moves with it.
Units for full coverage
Estimated3
To fill the area with overlap
Coverage funded
Estimated100%
40 units in the model
People reached
Estimated42,000
Of whom 1,680 were previously unserved
Mesh continuity
EstimatedContinuous
4.5 independent paths between two points
Free charges a year
Estimated321,200
22 sessions per bench per day at this kind of site
Mesh messages a minute
Estimated313
Shared airtime across the funded fleet
Footprint covered
Estimated4.0 km²
Overlapping cells, not raw radio circles
What this place is buying
Continuous mesh through the district, free public charging at every seat, a public Wi-Fi lane per bench and a quarter-hourly environmental record for the whole area.
Nobody should be more than a stated walk from a charge and a light.
On a route, coverage is not an area, it is a gap. A walker is never further from power than half the distance between two benches, because they can always turn round. Set the longest acceptable walk and the spacing follows. Modelled here on a 42 kilometre route at four kilometres an hour, with a forty five minute worst-case walk to power and sixty walkers a day at season peak.
Beacons on the route
Estimated8
6.0 km apart
Worst walk to power
Estimated45 min
From anywhere on the line, in either direction
Peak daily demand
Estimated1,320 Wh
All walkers, all devices, one day
December cover
Estimated100%
Winter supply covers peak demand
Same bench, four very different reasons to buy it.
- Variant
- Urban
- Scale
- 4 km²
- People
- 42,000
- Currently unserved
- 4 per cent
- What it buys
- Continuous mesh through the district, free public charging at every seat, a public Wi-Fi lane per bench and a quarter-hourly environmental record for the whole area.
- Variant
- Wayfarer
- Scale
- 42 km route
- People
- 900
- Currently unserved
- 85 per cent
- What it buys
- A charge point and a marker light within a stated walk from anywhere on the route, a message path out where there is no cell signal, and soil and rainfall data along the whole line.
- Variant
- Wayfarer
- Scale
- 620 km²
- People
- 78,000
- Currently unserved
- 46 per cent
- What it buys
- Island-wide mesh coverage with no operator agreement, free charging in every settlement it reaches, and a communications path that survives a storm taking the grid down.
- Variant
- Wayfarer
- Scale
- 90 km²
- People
- 24,000
- Currently unserved
- 94 per cent
- What it buys
- First electricity access for device charging, a mesh where there has never been a network, and a lit safe point after dark.
Islands are the clearest case we have
An island cannot negotiate its way onto a mainland operator's roadmap, and a storm that takes the grid down usually takes the towers with it. A chain of self-powered benches sited to hold the mesh gives a small nation a communications layer it owns outright, paid for out of a furniture and tourism budget, with free charging in every settlement the chain reaches. The same logic places benches in regions where there has never been a network, which is where the one in four programme puts the funded units.