Helium Mobile

See "The Billion Dollar Network No One Uses" by YouTuber Coffeezilla [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDhU295bUv4

I understand this initiative is connected with the Solana network [1] somehow? "What’s a Crypto carrier? Glad You Asked" [2]

There was a rage about Helium protocol recently. If I remember well it was moving from low speed IoT to mobile [3] and Algorand blockchain key people trying to push Helium to Algorand instead of Solana [4]

[1] https://solana.com/

[2] https://blog.hellohelium.com/whats-a-cryptocarrier-glad-you-...

[3] https://decrypt.co/110319/helium-founder-why-crypto-wireless...

[4] https://github.com/helium/HIP/issues/471

It’s not easy to place and install cell towers because they need to have good lines of sight to their area of coverage and they require a lot of power and installation expertise. Helium’s “box on your shelf” model where they got thousands of crypto enthusiasts to buy little boxes that pay out cryptocurrency for connecting to the network might have some plausibility of possibly working for ultra low bandwidth IoT use cases, but is physically incompatible with the demands of an actual high bandwidth cell phone network.

It looks like this is just an MVNO on top of t-mobile- MVNOs are basically where an existing cell phone company pays a small commission to someone who can sign up users. Sort of like an affiliate link. In this case, Helium is using this relationship to imply that they have built an actual cell phone network, which is probably very far from the truth.

From their blog posts…

Helium mobile is a mobile phone carrier which provides coverage via decentralized 5g cell sites. This is unlike traditional cell carriers which either own the cell site infrastructure or rent access to it from an often larger carrier.

Participants who host a 5g cell site on the network are rewarded in project specific crypto tokens. Similarly opted in mobile subscribers who verify the cell sites are also rewarded in tokens. [1][2]

A coverage map of the IoT network and mobile network (see the menu) can be seen here: https://explorer.helium.com/

And a little more info on the network incentives is talked about in this blog post: https://blog.helium.com/mobile-proof-of-coverage-the-road-ah...

1: https://blog.hellohelium.com/you-asked-we-answered/

2: https://youtu.be/cDhTOiJ1Qtk

They lost me at “crypto carrier”

Is this their third or fourth pivot? I've lost track.

Never trust a project with its own token.

A fool and his money are soon parted.