I'm happy you looked into. But I adamantly refute your point that these networks function better as charities, because the charity approach has been tried with

I'm happy you looked into. But I adamantly refute your point that these networks function better as charities, because the charity approach has been tried with an identical LoRaWAN network with something called The Things Network. Coverage is abysmal but its free to use and you can participate in a community of nerds who like to do this in their free time. The charity case doesn't solve the problem of ubiquitous coverage. Where does Helium token derive value? Their economic policy resembles a utility token, where transacting on the network costs a fixed dollar value per packet, and these 'credits' are derived from burning the native network token HNT. There are a few other burning mechanisms as well. The credits get paid out to the node which routes traffic. Helium nodes costs less than $2/month to operate (5-10W electricity). The longevity is uncertain, for sure. Its easy to call this growth model a resounding success but people are hesitant to build entire products on top of it because of the questions you raise. For now the Helium team is having good success convincing disparate Lorawan networks to roam onto Helium as a sort of extended coverage product, where range is high but may not be super reliable. All things considered this is a very new way of bootstrapping network infrastructure and appears very promising, and tokens are priced accordingly. It doesn't stop with Lorawan, 5G and wifi offload are launching this month and next year respectively. As with most things in crypto, they will either swallow the competition or fade into obscurity. I believe Helium is a strong asymmetric bet on disruption of network operator, neutral hosts and vertical asset industries.