The background in brief · Strategic Office Networks, LLC · August 2026
Project ION is an attempt to build a financially viable market for distributed work, education and health services in the communities where people already live. Whether it can pay for itself is the open question, and the Planner exists to test it in the open rather than assert it.
Resilience and quantum readiness are why it is worth building. Infrastructure at this scale is built once and inherited — it should be built to hold up for the people who come after. Neither shows up in the coverage ratio a lender tests. Both are the point.
Work has come unbound from any single location. Central Texas is growing faster than almost anywhere in the country, and the roads cannot keep pace. Autonomous mobility and resilient, local energy are maturing. And our dependence on digital systems is becoming near-total in a world growing less stable — demanding far more security and resilience than today’s arrangements provide. Each of these is usually discussed in a separate room. Together they point to one conclusion: the places where people work, learn, and access care are due for reinvention.
Project ION — an Intelligent Operations Network — is a network of Advanced Technology Centers: secure, shared, community-anchored hubs that bring distributed work, credentialed education, telehealth, and childcare within minutes of where people live, on a shared resilient fiber backbone. It does not begin as a region-wide build. It begins with a handful of connected demonstration sites, proves what works, and grows community by community.
Project ION is not a prescription for what any town should become. It is a proposed layer of physical and digital infrastructure — shared, secure, community-anchored — that changes what the region’s geography can carry, the way the Highland Lakes once changed what Austin’s could. The model behind it is a reference, not a template: one fully worked example, public and adjustable, demonstrating that the direction is financeable and ownable. The direction is the claim; each community writes its own expression of it.
Start with one household. For a typical suburban commuter — about 24 miles each way today, minutes from home instead — the model’s default assumptions return roughly 300 hours and about $2,600 in out-of-pocket driving costs every year, before counting the value of the time itself. Across the ~25-site Central Texas network modeled in the Planner (about 6,400 seats), that scales to on the order of 60 million vehicle-miles and 2 million commuter-hours avoided annually. Every one of those figures is an assumption you can change and test in the Planner.
Beyond the household: on deliberately conservative assumptions, replicating the model across the Texas Triangle over twenty years implies on the order of $6–7 billion in new built-environment investment — a building type that, like the data center before it, does not yet exist at scale but is poised to. For communities: jobs kept local, time returned to households, and resilience built in.
The Planner lets you test every assumption behind the model through five audience lenses. The Guide explains how it’s built. Longer-form articles on Distributed Metropolitan Design are on LinkedIn. The full white paper, Closing the Triangle, is available on request: mshear@pocketsnet.com.
Figures referenced here are planning estimates from the Project ION model — illustrative, assumption-driven, and testable in the Planner. Not an offer or a forecast.