Resilient last-mile emergency alerting via LoRa mesh radio — delivering government alerts to communities when cellular, internet, and broadcast infrastructure fail.
Canada's emergency alert infrastructure has a critical single point of failure: every public alerting channel — wireless push, broadcast TV/radio, and internet apps — depends on functioning telecommunications. During major earthquakes, large-scale power outages, or catastrophic weather events, these networks are often the first to fail. The 2022 Rogers outage took down cellular and internet for 12 million Canadians for 19 hours, leaving emergency call centers unreachable and Alert Ready wireless delivery completely non-functional.
MeshCore Canada bridges this gap: a cloud-hosted platform ingests 35+ official government alert feeds (Alert Ready, Environment Canada, AMBER, NRCan Earthquakes, PTWC Tsunami, provincial EMOs) and relays alerts to community LoRa mesh repeater stations over 915 MHz radio — technology that operates without any commercial infrastructure. A companion digital display kiosk provides public situational awareness, with local advertising revenue funding the volunteer repeater network sustainably.
📡 Mesh is for emergencies only. ONLY E-COM alerts and authorised test messages are pushed via MeshCore radio. Advertising is NEVER transmitted over the mesh — ads are exclusive to the digital display channel.
| Priority | Source | Poll | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Critical | Alert Ready NAAD CAP Feed | 15s | National |
| Critical | Pelmorex AMBER Alert Canada | 15s | National |
| High | NRCan Earthquakes Canada · PTWC Tsunami · CNSC Nuclear | 30–60s | National |
| High | Environment Canada CAP Alerts | 30s | National |
| Medium | Provincial EMOs ×13 · ECCC Weather Warnings ×13 | 60s | Per Province |
| Medium | Wildfire Services (BC/AB/ON/QC) · 511 Road · Air Quality | 120s | Per Province |
Deduplication: in-memory hash (60 min) + DB lookup for same-source title within 30 min. CAP-CP XML parsed for severity, urgency, bilingual text, and geographic targeting. Direct NAAD streaming client (naadStreamClient.js) is included as a placeholder — activation reduces latency to <5s and requires the Alert Ready Distributor Agreement with Pelmorex Corp.
| Layer | Control |
|---|---|
| Auth | JWT 24h · bcrypt cost-10 |
| Transport | TLS/HTTPS — Vercel edge |
| Rate limiting | 1000 req/15min per IP |
| HTTP headers | Helmet.js: HSTS, XSS, nosniff |
| Cron endpoint | CRON_SECRET constant-time compare |
| Roles | main_admin / sub_admin / user |
| Radio tx | Unencrypted by design — any MeshCore device receives alerts. No PII in alert content. |
| Component | Cost |
|---|---|
| Vercel Serverless API | $0/mo |
| Neon PostgreSQL (0.5 GB) | $0/mo |
| Vercel Cron (1-min) | $0/mo |
| SSL · CDN · Domain | $0/mo |
| Open-Meteo weather API | $0/mo |
| Heltec LoRa32 v3 node | ~$30 CAD (one-time) |
| Baseline total | $0/month |
LoRa 915 MHz operates under ISED RSS-210 (unlicensed ISM, max 1W ERP). Configured at 22 dBm (158 mW) — well within limits. Not a broadcaster under CRTC 2014-444. Alert content is not modified; accuracy liability rests with the originating government authority.
MeshCore Canada is deployable today at zero recurring cost, using commodity hardware, open-source software, and free cloud services. A single administrator can manage a province-wide network of volunteer operators, each responsible for their city's radio coverage — creating an emergency communications backbone that survives the very disasters it is designed to warn about.
Repeater operators, municipalities, and emergency management organizations are invited to join the network at ecommesh.live. US expansion partners being onboarded for Q3 2026.