The passive income for hotspot owners prior to Aug, 2021 was very real, many cases thousands per month for a single hotspot. The HNT coin price was much higher

The passive income for hotspot owners prior to Aug, 2021 was very real, many cases thousands per month for a single hotspot. The HNT coin price was much higher also hitting near $50 creating this incredible hope of easy money and for the early players who could get a hotspot they banked. Then Helium halved the coin in Aug/21 and it's been a downward spiral of HNT prices and software updates. The people who made $$ were the hotspot hardware manufacturers at $400 a pop with a lead time of 8-12 months to get one when the hype really started in Mar, 2021. For most today buying a hotspot would take 6-8 months ROI, but HNT prices really dictate that. So now with 900k hotspots installed Helium is pushing aside the lorawan network with less mining payouts in hopes/dreams people will flock to buying 5G cbrs implementations costing over $3k per site. Not sure what customers or applications will use this network, something helium still has to signup customers to create value. The network like 5G has range limitations, so you'll have to spend more to go further. If I recall amazon has a competitive cbrs product also. All I know is it's no simple plug/play. Early adopters really made a lot of $$ with Helium but it's been decline since late last year. It's truly one of the simplest miners to deploy in 5 minutes, but to get value you need a good antenna setup. I'm sure the Helium creators have a huge stash of HNT coins and not really worried.