6 ms·

Senet and Helium Announce LoRaWAN Network Integration Partnership

68 points by delabay 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
This is potentially very interesting for certain regional operations if the price is right. It’s good to have a little bit of competition against cellular. However, nothing really competes with the coverage of cellular networks yet. Even this press release boasts about being present in 29 states. An impressive accomplishment, but it’s a non-starter for any mass market products. If the price is low enough then this could be very attractive for local applications like sensor monitoring, smart meters, and other low bandwidth operations.
- delabay 5y ago
  This announcement is for 900Mhz (unregulated spectrum) coverage which is woefully underserved in the united states. 900Mhz LoRaWAN is for low power IoT devices. Helium is using blockchain coordination / incentive to change this equation -- where once was tons of geographically small and incompatible network, Helium is bridging them all by enabling roaming across the world at a price of $.00001 per packet (24 bytes). Most IoT application can run for years for less than a dollar since their data needs are small.
  - NotSammyHagar 5y ago
    Building a low power connected wan so you can use lots of internet of things devices just leads to adding radios in your devices and them reporting back on you. Today it's impractical because of cost to have my tv spy on me if I don't have it connected to the internet. But with this, in the future they will put low power radios on tvs, refridgerators, cars, anything. The money to pay for the crypto currency (helium) you get paid in must be coming from companies that will benefit from having these radios working. I know it's not that there is not legit use for this in terms of sensors. But there's also no way for me to restrict devices that in things I purchase from being part of this network.
    - delabay 5y ago
      Just use a Faraday cage in your home if you're worried about errant RF signals.
    - eli 5y ago
      Keeping the price of connectivity high was never going to be a longterm privacy safeguard. The answer is probably legislation
    - vmception 5y ago
      > The money to pay for the crypto currency (helium) you get paid in must be coming from companies that will benefit from having these radios working. It comes from inflation. There is an emission schedule. The demand to offset the inflation comes from the people/organizations that want to send data over these networks - which is not the device sellers or the people that own them. Data Credits have a fixed dollar amount so the cost to use the network is always predictable, but creating a data credit requires acquiring/purchasing Helium tokens and destroying them. So the more subscribers to send data over the network, the greater demand there is for Helium tokens in order to create Data Credits. The companies that benefit from the radios working make dollars from selling hardware to people that want to earn HNT and expand the network. Yes, there is now a reason for there to be a lot of IOT devices reporting stuff. Okay.
wyager 5y ago
I can’t take helium seriously because it’s an ICO scheme wrapped in a thinly plausible veneer of being about peer-to-peer communication. If you come up with a peer-to-peer network technology, and you want people to take it seriously, don’t try to make a quick buck off it. If it needs payments for routing or whatever, just use an existing payment technology like lightning or something. It would be hard to sound more like a hype scam if they tried: “Powered by the Helium Blockchain, The People’s Network represents a paradigm shift for decentralized wireless infrastructure.” Edit: against my better judgment I read some of the technical stuff on their site. This is either decentralized in name only or vulnerable to Sybil attacks.
- delabay 5y ago
  They have already built the worlds largest contiguous Lorawan network (a spectrum and application woefully underserved in the united states), and the network grows at 40-50% monthly. Token distribution is inherently tied to providing provably useful coverage, and "miners" use as much electricity as an LED lightbulb. This is probably the most socially useful, productive means of mining crypto conceived so far.
- heyrhett 5y ago
  Helium literally never did an ICO. So funny watching bitter losers at hackernews get everything about blockchain wrong and stay poor over the past 10 years. - Throw in some buzzwords you don't really understand like "lightning" (does not apply to helium as it is a protocol based on bitcoin script) - use the word "scam" because you don't own any and you didn't invest a few months ago when it was pennies. - sprinkle in some unfounded FUD about decentralization and Sybil attacks because you're bitter you still don't own any Helium is the fastest growing wireless network on the planet. There are currently 190,000 hotspots over the globe, up from 20,000 6-months ago. https://explorer.helium.com/ https://explorer.helium.com/ ...but but but against your better judgement you read some of the technical stuff... wooooowwwww Call me when the Helium node count drops below 100,000 again and I'll congratulate you and thank you for warning everyone about this "scam" before it was too late.
  - NotSammyHagar 5y ago
goodpoint 5y ago
LoRaWAN's marketing uses the word "community" a lot. Also add to that: > The Helium Network, also known as “The People’s Network”, ...and add the fact that LoRa and LoRaWAN is corporate-controlled and patented. This is all astroturfing. Do we really need yet another proprietary radio standard? > “proof-of-coverage” transactions earn Hotspot owners HNT cryptocurrency Yikes.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  Are there interesting open standards in a similar performance/power/range envelope?
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASH7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASH7
- delabay 5y ago
  LoRaWAN is extremely cheap (BOM and data costs) and quite frankly old tech compared to any other standard which fills the same market need. I have a water sensor that has a battery life of 10 years and $1 pays for all the data credits it ever needs.
- willidiots 5y ago
  Helium is ultimately independent of LoRaWAN though - it's now expanding to other protocols i.e. CBRS.
  - delabay 5y ago
    Helium CBRS will be the largest neutral host carrier of 5g by 2023 :)
- 5y ago
axus 5y ago
This reminded me to check up on how Althea is doing. Looks like they are changing their blockchain to something they have more control of: https://blog.althea.net/althea/ https://blog.althea.net/althea/
chewbaccainsf 5y ago
yeahhhhhhhhh boiiiiiiiiii !!!!!!!!! $HNT
gazzini 5y ago
I think the Helium project is a fascinating experiment, and I’ve had a lot of fun participating in it. I’ve been tracking my experience for a while (with pictures): [0] It’s certainly a weird project, and watching the corporation contort itself into something coordinated enough to drive partnerships like this but decentralized enough to qualify as a cryptocurrency is a sight to behold. The governance of this project isn’t “decentralized” in any strict sense of the word, but the separation of the dewi alliance from the main corporate entity is interesting. The self-imposed technical constraints are equally fun to observe. The scaling issues (gossiping blockchain data across 100k+ raspberry pi devices with no broker) are insane, and the incentive mechanism for “validators” is an interesting incremental solution. Specifically, people ”stake” $200k on cheap cloud servers, which might earn money for a few hrs a week when elected to a “consensus group.” This made sense historically (on distributed raspberry pi devices) but is now really strange compared to most other blockchains where validators earn consistently. Every one of these issues is a bottomless pit of learning opportunities as worlds collide (economics, telecom incentives, cryptocurrency price swings, hobbyist antennas, etc…). I’m no maximalist (I’ve sold lots of coins), but there is something deeply fun about watching _anybody_ try to do something novel to compete against the old guard. That’s why I was up at 6am today to fiddle with an antenna on a friend’s roof. 0: https://gazzini.com/projects/posts/helium/ https://gazzini.com/projects/posts/helium/
mNovak 5y ago
My general assumption of every crypto concept is that it is naturally incentivized to consume all available resources relevant to mining (e.g. Bitcoin -> electricity, Eth -> GPUs, Chia -> SSDs, etc). So then, what's the resource underlying HNT? Unlicensed ISM spectrum (and perhaps antenna rent, and latent internet backhaul). Which is actually kind of a scary thought, because among all crypto fuels, this one is actually very scarce. Sure, 900MHz is relatively underutilized and so spamming LoRa basestations every 100m isn't the end of the world; but imagine a logical extension of Helium into 2.4, 5GHz spectrum, where suddenly your home wifi is fighting for signal with 100s of venture-backed mining rigs on every street corner. Not saying good can't come from it, I do appreciate crypto concepts that actually try to accomplish something productive as a byproduct, and after all ample coverage of a cheap data network is a good thing, but the spectrum is fundamentally a shared resource, and needs to be approached carefully.
- delabay 5y ago
  There is a concept of saturation in Helium network. You can see the effect in real time as rewards are plummeting in oversubscribed areas like San Francisco. Too many nodes --> reward scale goes down --> network deployments percolate towards the perimeter where ROI is better --> Network grows in geographic coverage. This is the beauty of the proof of coverage scheme. Its an awesome way to distribute rewards to people who provide valuable coverage while simultaneously creating a force to disperse over a large geographic area.
- vmception 5y ago
  Geography is the resource The nodes need space between them You might like this one
safetiespeech 5y ago
About the onboarding fees: the $40 fee is for full nodes (which were high powered enough to participate in consensus groups until July this year when the switch to validators). Helium is working now to launch "light hotspots" the fee for which is $10. When light hotspots launch (retail price is ~$150) all current hotspots will get a software update. Finally, the fees act as a spam/scam filter only while the proof of coverage concept is necessary. When (if) a sufficient volume of data is moving through the network, the fees will no longer be needed.

68 points by delabay 5y ago

This is potentially very interesting for certain regional operations if the price is right. It’s good to have a little bit of competition against cellular. However, nothing really competes with the coverage of cellular networks yet. Even this press release boasts about being present in 29 states. An impressive accomplishment, but it’s a non-starter for any mass market products. If the price is low enough then this could be very attractive for local applications like sensor monitoring, smart meters, and other low bandwidth operations.

delabay 5y ago
This announcement is for 900Mhz (unregulated spectrum) coverage which is woefully underserved in the united states. 900Mhz LoRaWAN is for low power IoT devices. Helium is using blockchain coordination / incentive to change this equation -- where once was tons of geographically small and incompatible network, Helium is bridging them all by enabling roaming across the world at a price of $.00001 per packet (24 bytes). Most IoT application can run for years for less than a dollar since their data needs are small.
- NotSammyHagar 5y ago
  Building a low power connected wan so you can use lots of internet of things devices just leads to adding radios in your devices and them reporting back on you. Today it's impractical because of cost to have my tv spy on me if I don't have it connected to the internet. But with this, in the future they will put low power radios on tvs, refridgerators, cars, anything. The money to pay for the crypto currency (helium) you get paid in must be coming from companies that will benefit from having these radios working. I know it's not that there is not legit use for this in terms of sensors. But there's also no way for me to restrict devices that in things I purchase from being part of this network.
  - delabay 5y ago
    Just use a Faraday cage in your home if you're worried about errant RF signals.
  - eli 5y ago
    Keeping the price of connectivity high was never going to be a longterm privacy safeguard. The answer is probably legislation
  - vmception 5y ago
    > The money to pay for the crypto currency (helium) you get paid in must be coming from companies that will benefit from having these radios working. It comes from inflation. There is an emission schedule. The demand to offset the inflation comes from the people/organizations that want to send data over these networks - which is not the device sellers or the people that own them. Data Credits have a fixed dollar amount so the cost to use the network is always predictable, but creating a data credit requires acquiring/purchasing Helium tokens and destroying them. So the more subscribers to send data over the network, the greater demand there is for Helium tokens in order to create Data Credits. The companies that benefit from the radios working make dollars from selling hardware to people that want to earn HNT and expand the network. Yes, there is now a reason for there to be a lot of IOT devices reporting stuff. Okay.

wyager 5y ago

I can’t take helium seriously because it’s an ICO scheme wrapped in a thinly plausible veneer of being about peer-to-peer communication. If you come up with a peer-to-peer network technology, and you want people to take it seriously, don’t try to make a quick buck off it. If it needs payments for routing or whatever, just use an existing payment technology like lightning or something. It would be hard to sound more like a hype scam if they tried: “Powered by the Helium Blockchain, The People’s Network represents a paradigm shift for decentralized wireless infrastructure.” Edit: against my better judgment I read some of the technical stuff on their site. This is either decentralized in name only or vulnerable to Sybil attacks.

delabay 5y ago
They have already built the worlds largest contiguous Lorawan network (a spectrum and application woefully underserved in the united states), and the network grows at 40-50% monthly. Token distribution is inherently tied to providing provably useful coverage, and "miners" use as much electricity as an LED lightbulb. This is probably the most socially useful, productive means of mining crypto conceived so far.
heyrhett 5y ago
Helium literally never did an ICO. So funny watching bitter losers at hackernews get everything about blockchain wrong and stay poor over the past 10 years. - Throw in some buzzwords you don't really understand like "lightning" (does not apply to helium as it is a protocol based on bitcoin script) - use the word "scam" because you don't own any and you didn't invest a few months ago when it was pennies. - sprinkle in some unfounded FUD about decentralization and Sybil attacks because you're bitter you still don't own any Helium is the fastest growing wireless network on the planet. There are currently 190,000 hotspots over the globe, up from 20,000 6-months ago. https://explorer.helium.com/ https://explorer.helium.com/ ...but but but against your better judgement you read some of the technical stuff... wooooowwwww Call me when the Helium node count drops below 100,000 again and I'll congratulate you and thank you for warning everyone about this "scam" before it was too late.
- NotSammyHagar 5y ago

goodpoint 5y ago

LoRaWAN's marketing uses the word "community" a lot. Also add to that: > The Helium Network, also known as “The People’s Network”, ...and add the fact that LoRa and LoRaWAN is corporate-controlled and patented. This is all astroturfing. Do we really need yet another proprietary radio standard? > “proof-of-coverage” transactions earn Hotspot owners HNT cryptocurrency Yikes.

dv_dt 5y ago
Are there interesting open standards in a similar performance/power/range envelope?
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASH7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASH7
delabay 5y ago
LoRaWAN is extremely cheap (BOM and data costs) and quite frankly old tech compared to any other standard which fills the same market need. I have a water sensor that has a battery life of 10 years and $1 pays for all the data credits it ever needs.
willidiots 5y ago
Helium is ultimately independent of LoRaWAN though - it's now expanding to other protocols i.e. CBRS.
- delabay 5y ago
  Helium CBRS will be the largest neutral host carrier of 5g by 2023 :)
5y ago

axus 5y ago

This reminded me to check up on how Althea is doing. Looks like they are changing their blockchain to something they have more control of: https://blog.althea.net/althea/ https://blog.althea.net/althea/

chewbaccainsf 5y ago

yeahhhhhhhhh boiiiiiiiiii !!!!!!!!! $HNT

gazzini 5y ago

I think the Helium project is a fascinating experiment, and I’ve had a lot of fun participating in it. I’ve been tracking my experience for a while (with pictures): [0] It’s certainly a weird project, and watching the corporation contort itself into something coordinated enough to drive partnerships like this but decentralized enough to qualify as a cryptocurrency is a sight to behold. The governance of this project isn’t “decentralized” in any strict sense of the word, but the separation of the dewi alliance from the main corporate entity is interesting. The self-imposed technical constraints are equally fun to observe. The scaling issues (gossiping blockchain data across 100k+ raspberry pi devices with no broker) are insane, and the incentive mechanism for “validators” is an interesting incremental solution. Specifically, people ”stake” $200k on cheap cloud servers, which might earn money for a few hrs a week when elected to a “consensus group.” This made sense historically (on distributed raspberry pi devices) but is now really strange compared to most other blockchains where validators earn consistently. Every one of these issues is a bottomless pit of learning opportunities as worlds collide (economics, telecom incentives, cryptocurrency price swings, hobbyist antennas, etc…). I’m no maximalist (I’ve sold lots of coins), but there is something deeply fun about watching _anybody_ try to do something novel to compete against the old guard. That’s why I was up at 6am today to fiddle with an antenna on a friend’s roof. 0: https://gazzini.com/projects/posts/helium/ https://gazzini.com/projects/posts/helium/

mNovak 5y ago

My general assumption of every crypto concept is that it is naturally incentivized to consume all available resources relevant to mining (e.g. Bitcoin -> electricity, Eth -> GPUs, Chia -> SSDs, etc). So then, what's the resource underlying HNT? Unlicensed ISM spectrum (and perhaps antenna rent, and latent internet backhaul). Which is actually kind of a scary thought, because among all crypto fuels, this one is actually very scarce. Sure, 900MHz is relatively underutilized and so spamming LoRa basestations every 100m isn't the end of the world; but imagine a logical extension of Helium into 2.4, 5GHz spectrum, where suddenly your home wifi is fighting for signal with 100s of venture-backed mining rigs on every street corner. Not saying good can't come from it, I do appreciate crypto concepts that actually try to accomplish something productive as a byproduct, and after all ample coverage of a cheap data network is a good thing, but the spectrum is fundamentally a shared resource, and needs to be approached carefully.

delabay 5y ago
There is a concept of saturation in Helium network. You can see the effect in real time as rewards are plummeting in oversubscribed areas like San Francisco. Too many nodes --> reward scale goes down --> network deployments percolate towards the perimeter where ROI is better --> Network grows in geographic coverage. This is the beauty of the proof of coverage scheme. Its an awesome way to distribute rewards to people who provide valuable coverage while simultaneously creating a force to disperse over a large geographic area.
vmception 5y ago
Geography is the resource The nodes need space between them You might like this one

safetiespeech 5y ago

About the onboarding fees: the $40 fee is for full nodes (which were high powered enough to participate in consensus groups until July this year when the switch to validators). Helium is working now to launch "light hotspots" the fee for which is $10. When light hotspots launch (retail price is ~$150) all current hotspots will get a software update. Finally, the fees act as a spam/scam filter only while the proof of coverage concept is necessary. When (if) a sufficient volume of data is moving through the network, the fees will no longer be needed.