The People’s Network: The Future of Mobile & Wireless

Helium has set an ambitious goal: to build a reliable, ubiquitous, global wireless network that’s owned and operated by its users. Helium Inc. – the company developing the Helium network – have nicknamed it ‘the People’s Network.’ The nick-name comes from the Helium networks design which combines crypto-economic incentives and a marketplace for connecting Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices with affordable bandwidth. Helium essentially seeks to become ‘the Airbnb of telcos (telecommunications companies)’, enabling anyone to contribute to providing permissionless, low-bandwidth connectivity for IoT devices (i.e., smart watches, electric scooters, medical sensors, etc.).

The Helium network is operational today offering real-world solutions for end-users and businesses that Helium claims is up to 100x cheaper than legacy telecommunications networks like AT&T and Verizon. In just 18 months, Helium has built a functional network of more than 73,000+ wireless ‘Hotspots’ – the nodes of the Helium blockchain, which also serve as wireless base stations for an IoT network – in over 3,800 cities around the world (here’s a global coverage map). That makes Helium the world’s largest LoRaWAN – a low-power, low-bandwidth data transfer protocol – network already, and it’s just getting started. With 200,000 more Hotspots on back order, Helium CEO Amir Haleem believes there’s a strong likelihood of a network of 600,000 by late 2022 making it plausible Helium could achieve its goal of providing global LoRaWAN coverage in the next few years.

Source: Twitter, @rawrmaan/Arman Dezfuli-Arjomandi

The Legacy Model of Wireless

The core innovation driving Helium’s rapid growth is its network business model. To fully understand the Helium advantage, first consider the legacy wireless telco model that Helium is disrupting, which is centralized and proprietary.

For traditional telcos, building a large wireless network is extremely complex and capital intensive. Before telcos acquire any customers or revenue, they have enormous upfront capital costs. First, they have to buy exclusive rights to broadcast spectrum to protect their future business. Next they have to develop and deploy a widespread network of proprietary hardware to operate only in that spectrum, including buying or leasing real estate to host the hardware. In parallel, these firms have to develop proprietary software to run the system. Throughout the process, companies also need to ensure regulatory compliance across multiple local jurisdictions with overlapping or inconsistent requirements.