Our connection speeds are capped at 25Mbps down, and 15Mbps up. The exact speed you get at any given time will vary, depending on your location, the season, the weather, the tides (seriously!), and the overall usage of the system. However, our goal is to make sure that everyone always has a good enough connection to comfortably stream a movie, participate in a video call, or have multiple people browse the web at the same time.

Unlike satellite or cellular-based plans, there are no data caps: GAIA members will always have unlimited data with no reduction in speed.

One common problem with internet services is for everybody’s speed to degrade over time as more users join the system. We’ll be keeping a careful eye on this and are committed to making any necessary and possible upgrades to ensure that the level of service stays high.

GAIA buys internet bandwidth wholesale to distribute to our members on Galiano. The connections (called “backhauls”) to our wholesale providers are varied: wireless links to towers on Saturna, Salt Spring, and Tsawwassen, and an undersea fiber to Duncan. Ultimately, we end up connected to both Telus and Shaw’s commercial networks. Because we have multiple backhauls, we have a certain amount of redundancy and resiliency if one of the links fails. However, the nature of providing internet on the island, especially with a volunteer crew, is that you should expect the occasional outage. We will do our best to keep these few and far between.

Once it’s on the island, we move the bandwidth around on our backbone of about a dozen high-elevation sites that are connected to each other with 5Ghz point-to-point wireless links.

Most of these backbone sites also include a 2.4Ghz broadcast antenna. Members connect to the backbone by pointing a directional radio dish at the nearest of these antennas. The clearer the line of sight to the antenna we can get, the better the signal will be, which is why we will almost always install the dish high up in a tree.