impressive to me that this thing managed to construct global coverage provided by literally tens or hundreds of thousands of disparate actors, while delivering

impressive to me that this thing managed to construct global coverage provided by literally tens or hundreds of thousands of disparate actors, while delivering on nearly zero of the mesh networking dream. IIUC each node is a one-way LoRa gateway. literally: a Helium device can only communicate with devices NOT on Helium. in the LoRa implementation traffic is strictly one-way. a device can transmit sensor/heartbeat data, and that’s it. no ACKs from whatever IP service is ingesting that data, much less HTTP error codes. the 5g stuff doesn’t really solve this. it broadens the applications — because at least now you can have bidirectional comms initiated from within the Helium network (TCP streams). but you still can’t initiate connections into or even within the network. it’s fundamentally flawed as a “mesh network”, in that it only works so long as a majority of IP destinations aren’t on Helium.