A row of solar canopy benches lighting a wet high street at dusk between tall frontages
EN/ABEL Communications

Every bench is a grid node and an Enigma Mesh rnode

A bench carries its own generation, storage, local consumption and surplus reporting. It joins the Enigma Mesh, the sovereign mesh cell network operated by EN/ABEL Communications, as an active rnode with its own antenna in the canopy upright, powered from the same battery budget. Coverage and mesh density grow with every site adopted, and they grow exactly where buildings block conventional signal.

0

Benches in the pipeline

Verified

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Active rnodes at full adoption

Verified

0.0 kWp

Modelled generation capacity

Estimated

Towns with sites

Verified

0

Node radiated power

Estimated

100 mW

A fraction of a handset, in short bursts

Draw from the bench battery

Estimated

1.4 W

Average, no mains, no groundworks

Benches for full UK land coverage

Assumed

30,000

Target end state, paired with partner backbone tiers

Who EN/ABEL is

A named operator, not a slogan: EN/ABEL Communications

EN/ABEL Communications operates the Enigma Mesh, including the licensed and satellite tiers and the control plane that keeps them coherent. Canopei supplies one tier of it: the street layer of solar powered rnodes carried inside public furniture, in the places people already sit, with no mains connection and no civil works. Two companies, two jobs, one network you can go and look at.

Network operatorEN/ABEL

Licensed spectrum, satellite backhaul, mesh control plane

EN/ABEL holds the network relationships and the upper tiers of the Enigma Mesh. Traffic is encrypted end to end before it reaches any node, so a relaying bench carries ciphertext and nothing else.

[1] www.enable.co.ukVerified
Street layerCanopei

Solar rnodes on furniture, one per bench

Every bench adds one rnode at seat height, powered from the same battery budget that runs the lighting and the charging ports. Node counts, density and coverage staging on this page are modelled from adoption, not measured in the field, and are labelled Estimated or Assumed wherever that is the case.

Estimated
  1. [1]

    EN/ABEL Communications · EN/ABEL Communications

    EN/ABEL Communications as the operator of the Enigma Mesh, including the licensed and satellite tiers. Canopei supplies the street layer of solar rnodes only.

    Verified

  2. [2]

    Enigma Mesh street-layer model, desk calculation · Canopei

    Node counts, urban shadowing, festival control-plane capacity and UK coverage staging on this page are modelled from adoption, not measured deployments.

    Estimated

What sits in the canopy

The bench is the smallest tier of a four tier sovereign mesh

We do not operate a phone network. EN/ABEL Communications operates the Enigma Mesh, including every licensed and satellite tier. What Canopei contributes is the street layer: thousands of solar powered rnodes on furniture, in the places people already sit, with no mains connection and no civil works. Traffic is encrypted end to end before it reaches a node, so a relaying bench carries ciphertext and nothing else.

Urban shadowing

Buildings are the problem. Street level nodes are the answer

A mast on a rooftop sees over a town centre. Nobody standing in the town centre sees the mast. Continuous frontages, glass, steel and reinforced concrete cut a clear path down to a fraction of its range, which is why signal collapses in the exact streets with the most people in them. A bench node sits inside the shadow rather than above it, so instead of fighting the geometry it hops around it: bench to bench, at pavement height, with several independent routes between any two points.

Mean spacing between benches

140 m

Share of clear range surviving buildings

18%

Benches adopted in the cell

40
Estimated

1,440 m

Effective hop range after shadowing

Estimated

20

Direct neighbours per node

Estimated

7.1

Nodes per kilometre of street

Estimated

5.0

Independent routes between two points

Estimated

5.46 km

Contiguous covered frontage

Estimated

313

Cell messages per minute, shared airtime

Estimated
This cell holds a continuous link end to end

No records

Festivals and crowd events

A control plane for the people running the event, when the public network has already collapsed

At crowd scale the public cells saturate: tens of thousands of handsets share a handful of sectors and everything degrades at once, usually at the worst moment. A bench fleet does not fix consumer video, and we will not pretend it does. What it does is carry the traffic the event actually depends on: presence, short messaging, incident and welfare reports, steward and asset location, and SOS. That traffic runs on radio the crowd is not competing for, and it is reserved for control, medical, stewarding, traders and the emergency services.

People on site at peak

80,000

Benches in the fleet

220

Operational users as a share of the crowd

3.5%
Estimated

2,800

Operational users served

Estimated

1,069

Fleet messages per minute

Estimated

0.4

Messages per operational user per minute

Estimated

5

Hops from site edge to control

Estimated

2.1 s

Round trip for a short message

Estimated

26,667

People per public cell sector

Estimated

880,000

Messages held through an uplink outage

Estimated

52 min

Outage the buffer covers at full traffic

Estimated

Because the benches are off grid and moveable, the whole network is temporary infrastructure: it arrives on a lorry, builds a dense cell on a green field, and leaves with no trenching and nothing to decommission. The same fleet that shades the crowd and charges their phones is the fleet carrying the safety traffic.

Nationwide staging

From one Manchester high street to full UK land coverage

Coverage is bought street by street, not launched. Each stage below is a stand-alone business case, because the furniture pays for itself on shade, charging and dwell time, and mesh density is the by-product. Stages one and two are estimated from the live pipeline. Everything past corridor stitching is labelled Assumed and depends on host recruitment at scale and on partner backbone and satellite tiers for the coverage edge in the Highlands, the Islands and mid Wales.

Who this is for

What the average person gets out of it

Someone on a school run or a shift change
What they get
A free charge and a covered seat on a street where the phone signal drops between buildings
A trader on a market or a high street
What they get
Card terminals that keep talking when the town centre cell is congested at lunchtime
A steward, medic or event controller
What they get
A radio-grade control plane the crowd is not competing for
A village with one bar of signal
What they get
One adopted pub garden that carries presence and messaging for the whole settlement
A council resilience team
What they get
A link that survives a mains cut because every node is solar and battery backed

Nothing about the seat, the shade, the light or the charging is behind a subscription. There is no app to install to sit down. The mesh is what keeps the site working without a mains connection, and it is a public good that grows every time a venue adopts a bench for reasons of its own.

Site map

Each adopted site lights up and links to its neighbours

Coverage radii are the modelled mesh reach per node, calculated from the 260 m effective street-height link budget. Site coordinates plot the rollout pattern rather than signed addresses.

No records

Network effects

The tipping point where a high street becomes fully covered

Estimated

Site onboarding flow

Value exchange

Roof-equivalent area on land already in use
What the network gives back
Charging, lighting and connectivity with no groundworks
Siting and consent
What the network gives back
Extra outdoor trading hours and dwell time
Data sharing agreement
What the network gives back
Dashboard of generation, sessions, dwell time and mesh uptime
Visibility on a public frontage
What the network gives back
Footfall from a covered high street and ESG reporting figures
A mount point above head height for an anchor node
What the network gives back
A site link that keeps working when the mains and the mast are both down

Specified connectivity parameters

Link budget at street height and the scope of works between the furniture layer and the operator layer.

Street-height mesh link budget
Value in use
868 MHz, 27 dBm EIRP, 1.1 m antenna height: 410 m clear range, 260 m effective in terraced streets, 1.2 kbps sustained control-plane throughput per hop
Method
Link budget from transmit power, 2.1 dBi antenna, minus a 14 dB street-canyon margin over a two-ray ground model, cross-checked against the bench spacing already used in the density model.
If it moves
A 60 m range loss raises the benches needed for continuous urban coverage by about 18 percent, which the density explorer already lets you run.
EN/ABEL Communications scope of works
Value in use
Street layer hosted by Canopei, operator layer by EN/ABEL. 70/30 split of node service revenue to EN/ABEL, no personal data at the bench, twelve-month rolling term per borough.
Method
Written against the two-layer architecture on /enabel: we own the furniture, the mount and the power; the operator owns the service and the customer relationship.
If it moves
A 60/40 split moves connectivity contribution per bench-year by about 9 GBP, well inside the hardware margin.
Modelled