#mesh networking

Context: my novel is set in an alt-universe USA (history diverging around 1800) in a roughly modern-day-equivalent time period. The novel explores the differences between our USA and the fictional one quite thoroughly, but I'm being intentionally vague about how the rest of the world's history diverged in this AU; I'm leaving that to fanfic writers, so that non-Americans can write their own headcanons for their own regions on a completely blank slate.

With one exception.

Much like in our universe, Africa got onto the Internet somewhat later than the rest of the world, for similarly racist reasons. (Just because it's an AU doesn't mean white folks weren't absolute monsters throughout the second millennium AD.) Because of some ways that technology is different in this world, that gave Africans an opportunity that wasn't available in places where Internet connectivity was already well-entrenched, and—while not saying anything about any specific country or people—by and large, they took it.

In AU!Africa, there are many, many fewer fixed-service Internet connections (including both wired and cellular connections in that category), because around 90% of the computers in Africa are interconnected in a continent-spanning wireless peer-to-peer mesh network. In effect, Africa has its own Internet which is separate from (but connected to) the global Internet, and it's based around the concept of reaching out to your neighbors, rather than that of connecting to a central authority.

When Western researchers observed this phenomenon, they dubbed it the African Continental Mesh, and that's the name that stuck in the international English press, because white people. However, African users and researchers were obviously talking about this long before any outsiders were.

My question for you is this: what was the name that they used to refer to this continent-wide tapestry of local connectivity? I'd like to use that as the acronym that people use to abbreviate it, even in English. Sort of like how the acronym for Doctors Without Borders is MSF, reflecting its official French name, I'd like for the acronym for the African Continental Mesh to be something besides ACM or MCA.

Some thoughts:

The name doesn't have to be based on the English name at all; again, this name was being used in-world before Westerners knew about it

The name doesn't need to contain words like "mesh" (or its translation) or any explicit reference to the technology used; feel free to use poetic license and/or cultural references

This mesh was not created as a monolithic initiative. This is not its "official" name because there is no "official" name; this is just the name that African researchers were using when they realized that the various local African meshes had grown and merged to the point where basically everyone was interconnected

This does not include literally all of Africa. In particular, it doesn't operate in regions where Western-style consumer broadband had already been widely deployed before the mesh technology was available (which was sometime in the 21st century)

The name doesn't have to be Swahili in particular; this name could have been coined by any African researcher, in any language (other than English)

The mesh technology was originally developed as a university research program (from an unnamed university that will remain ambiguous), and it was not developed specifically for Africa. The African mesh is not the only mesh using this technology that exists in the world, it is simply the largest, by several orders of magnitude

The full name will not appear in the text, only the acronym. If the name is in any language that doesn't have an official way to write it using a Latin alphabet, the acronym will presumably be based on a Latin-script transliteration, but also feel free to get creative in that case

If the name is only a single word (or if the concept of words doesn't apply to the language) then its abbreviation will probably be first-letter/skipped-letters/last-letter, like I18N for "internationalization", L10N for "localization", or A11Y for "accessibility"

Thank you in advance! ❤️ If I use your idea, I'll credit you in the footnotes (where I can also include the full name and any etymology you've come up with for it).