What's OPs view of helium network? It basically solved the issue of network deployment for LoRaWAN. It covers the vast majority of American population centers, Western Europe, and soon south america and APAC.
The idea is that if you are designing and selling a product, say, a dog collar, you can build Helium(*) capabilities into your product by including a LoRa chip in it. Your customers can then use the Helium(*) network to communicate with the dog collar, for example to locate a missing dog. The fees for this service then flows to the people that have deployed the base stations that facilitate this communication.
To me, this seems like a great way both to build an access network and to get people invested in (and excited in) the process. There are now also a bunch of companies who are taking advantage of this network for their products.
(What we at Thingsquare is doing, and what is discussed in the article, is a little different from what Helium(*) is doing. We are providing a single-purpose network for one system/product, such as a street lighting system. That entire system is connected using its own mesh network, and that mesh network is typically not used for anything but that product's communication needs.)
*: Helium recently changed their name to Nova Labs but I'm not sure exactly how that will effect the naming of the Helium network: https://blog.helium.com/elevating-the-helium-network-with-ne...
Zoom in on your neighborhood and look at the number of nodes.
Here's my small town in Northern Maine: https://explorer.helium.com/hotspots/hex/882b1a06a5fffff
There are three hotspots available for a relatively obscure IoT network. Not only that, if you look at the data tab on these, they're actually getting use. Really cool.
I was disappointed to see that the network seems intended for transmitting very small amounts of data. For example, by my messing around with their calculator, transmitting a gigabyte of information would cost ~400 dollars.
The network gets global utilization processing about 40M packets a day. Not big in terms of dollar $ yet, but people are indeed using it. Definitely nobody is suggesting you watch YouTube or even send emails with it.
Do you have a source for the 40m packets number? Does that include the packets that the miners send to each other for proof of coverage?
I'm having trouble imagining the uses for an expensive, slow, unreliable, bespoke network that's limited to the areas with helium miners nearby. If you have an example of someone using this I'd love to read more.
You can measure this yourself at etl.dewi.org
"Mining HNT with Hotspots is done via radio technology, not expensive or wasteful GPUs. … Hotspots work together to form a new global wireless network and undertake ‘Proof-of-Coverage’."
"Tokens & Data Credits: The network uses two units of exchange: HNT, a new cryptocurrency, and Data Credits. Proof-of-Coverage: Our novel proof-of-work algorithm enables Hotspots to be rewarded trustlessly. Helium LongFi: LongFi combines the low-power, long-range LoRaWAN wireless protocol with the Helium Blockchain."
I get the impression is it's to create a cryptocurrency motivation for providing good network coverage. I don't get how it works but assume, like all things involving blockchain, there are externalities or unintended effects that make it not a good solution.
Helium is the quintessential example of Blockchain doing obvious social good when all traditional means of accomplishing the same goal had failed.
I've not really dug into the details as to what solutions Helium has, but it is quite interesting to see how this experiment will play out.
A much more realistic risk is sudden insolvency of a specific vendor (who are also responsible for maintaining firmware). There are about 30 approved vendors, growing monthly, but some have a larger share of the mining pool than others. The community is anticipating long term business risks and devising mechanisms to prevent a sudden loss of a large percentage of nodes due to business risk.
I firmly believe there is a significant flywheel developing here and I recently left my FAANG job to build in this ecosystem.