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I think from the beginning Helium targeted people who just didn't know anything about wireless. The economics have never made any sense, and I'm fairly sure res

I think from the beginning Helium targeted people who just didn't know anything about wireless. The economics have never made any sense, and I'm fairly sure reselling your ISP's Internet is a violation of their ToS. So the second this saw any actual adoption, upstream ISPs would probably start coming along to shut down the busiest nodes.

wslh 4y ago
Remember Fon (2006) [1] ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_Wireless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_Wireless
- schmichael 4y ago
  I don't! I know Xfinity does this today, and I'm guessing copied Fon's model. I think it goes to my point about breaking ToS: ISPs sell Internet. They don't want to compete with their own customers reselling that Internet. That's the business they're already in! Instead what Xfinity did is made it a value-add for customers: wherever you go, if you're near an Xfinity router you can get free wifi.
  - detaro 4y ago
    Helium didn't "sell internet" in a really comparable sense.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      Sure they were. Really, really slow internet. [edit] Unless you meant the fact literally nobody used it and all their revenue came from selling base stations, in which case you're right, they never really did operate an ISP. They operated a Potemkin ISP.
      - detaro 4y ago
        If I can't send a TCP packet over it, it is not "Internet" IMHO. Combined with the extremely slow speeds these kind of networks really are their own thing.
        arcticbull 4y ago
        The ability to send a TCP packet to any destination on the internet is basically the definition of the internet. There's no minimum speed limit for the internet :) what is its own thing is the physical layer. Wikipedia agrees: > ... LoRa and LoRaWAN define a Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) networking protocol designed to wirelessly connect battery operated devices to the internet in regional, national or global networks ... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
- dale_glass 4y ago
  I remember them selling a bunch of access points at a local Linux convention for cheap, preloaded with their firmware. They seemed very happy about it, blissfully unaware that everyone else was happy at the low price and was discussing loading DD-WRT on them 5 minutes after opening the box.
llamataboot 4y ago
It actually did make sense - not GREAT SENSE - but for the crypto space it was top of the tier, and for VC in general there was a model there. You weren't reselling your bandwidth, you were communicating with other hotspots via LoRA (and yes, using bandwidth to mine and sync, but I can use bandwidth for anything) I'm not sure what the economics would have looked like in general - certainly not $100/month for a $250 miner that's for sure, but the idea of much cheaper transmission of very low-bandwidth data by incentivizing people to put hotspots all over the world was a good one. Shame to see at the heart was another Get Rich Quick For Me and Mine though.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  The problem was always going to be coverage that made sense and an inability to be competitive. 'Decentralizing' just meant there were zero guarantees that there would ever be service in any given area, no guarantees on how long it would take to solve outages - and completely variable pricing that fluctuated based on hype, not demand. You know, the things that businesses care about. They wanted it to cover random far-out forests but there's no backhaul out there. If this model made sense, like any decentralized model, it would have been cheaper, faster and more reliable for a traditional ISP to just come in and offer the service - they were the backhaul anyways. Individuals had to pay their ISP margins to sublet the pipes when the ISPs themselves obviously had no such constraint - so the floor price was always higher than what an ISP could offer it at. This meant that no matter what an ISP could undercut this network on price with a better, faster, and more reliable service that actually had SLAs. It was just another crypto scheme, like all the others. It was never about the business. It was always about VCs being able to flip tokens for liquidity on day 1 instead of waiting for year 10 and at some point 'talking your book' and 'delusion' blend together.
  - llamataboot 4y ago
    I hear you and don't exactly disagree, but I don't always agree that a P2P decentralized model is inevitably better served by centralized people making the hard decisions that make good business sense. There are different incentives in play, and some of them push towards centralization with a profit motive, some of them push towards decentralization with a profit motive and some of them push towards pure decentralization without a profit motive. Where the crypto space remains a cesspool of failed projects and snake oil it's usually because someone sold one as the other and no one understood (or cared as long as they were in the right part of the pyramid) about it. I'm not 100% sure that Helium didn't have an actual use case that could have made sense for some applications far better than say Verizon doing the same thing. Whether that was ultimately the intention of the people involved at the core or whether it could have happened in the token/crypto/ponzi/flipper domain, I don't know. I have seen a lot of decentralized models that may have made sense in a certain domain get crushed under the pressure of some people getting rich quick or using a business model for taken speculation.

wslh 4y ago

Remember Fon (2006) [1] ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_Wireless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fon_Wireless

schmichael 4y ago
I don't! I know Xfinity does this today, and I'm guessing copied Fon's model. I think it goes to my point about breaking ToS: ISPs sell Internet. They don't want to compete with their own customers reselling that Internet. That's the business they're already in! Instead what Xfinity did is made it a value-add for customers: wherever you go, if you're near an Xfinity router you can get free wifi.
- detaro 4y ago
  Helium didn't "sell internet" in a really comparable sense.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    Sure they were. Really, really slow internet. [edit] Unless you meant the fact literally nobody used it and all their revenue came from selling base stations, in which case you're right, they never really did operate an ISP. They operated a Potemkin ISP.
    - detaro 4y ago
      If I can't send a TCP packet over it, it is not "Internet" IMHO. Combined with the extremely slow speeds these kind of networks really are their own thing.
      - arcticbull 4y ago
        The ability to send a TCP packet to any destination on the internet is basically the definition of the internet. There's no minimum speed limit for the internet :) what is its own thing is the physical layer. Wikipedia agrees: > ... LoRa and LoRaWAN define a Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) networking protocol designed to wirelessly connect battery operated devices to the internet in regional, national or global networks ... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
dale_glass 4y ago
I remember them selling a bunch of access points at a local Linux convention for cheap, preloaded with their firmware. They seemed very happy about it, blissfully unaware that everyone else was happy at the low price and was discussing loading DD-WRT on them 5 minutes after opening the box.

llamataboot 4y ago

It actually did make sense - not GREAT SENSE - but for the crypto space it was top of the tier, and for VC in general there was a model there. You weren't reselling your bandwidth, you were communicating with other hotspots via LoRA (and yes, using bandwidth to mine and sync, but I can use bandwidth for anything) I'm not sure what the economics would have looked like in general - certainly not $100/month for a $250 miner that's for sure, but the idea of much cheaper transmission of very low-bandwidth data by incentivizing people to put hotspots all over the world was a good one. Shame to see at the heart was another Get Rich Quick For Me and Mine though.

arcticbull 4y ago
The problem was always going to be coverage that made sense and an inability to be competitive. 'Decentralizing' just meant there were zero guarantees that there would ever be service in any given area, no guarantees on how long it would take to solve outages - and completely variable pricing that fluctuated based on hype, not demand. You know, the things that businesses care about. They wanted it to cover random far-out forests but there's no backhaul out there. If this model made sense, like any decentralized model, it would have been cheaper, faster and more reliable for a traditional ISP to just come in and offer the service - they were the backhaul anyways. Individuals had to pay their ISP margins to sublet the pipes when the ISPs themselves obviously had no such constraint - so the floor price was always higher than what an ISP could offer it at. This meant that no matter what an ISP could undercut this network on price with a better, faster, and more reliable service that actually had SLAs. It was just another crypto scheme, like all the others. It was never about the business. It was always about VCs being able to flip tokens for liquidity on day 1 instead of waiting for year 10 and at some point 'talking your book' and 'delusion' blend together.
- llamataboot 4y ago
  I hear you and don't exactly disagree, but I don't always agree that a P2P decentralized model is inevitably better served by centralized people making the hard decisions that make good business sense. There are different incentives in play, and some of them push towards centralization with a profit motive, some of them push towards decentralization with a profit motive and some of them push towards pure decentralization without a profit motive. Where the crypto space remains a cesspool of failed projects and snake oil it's usually because someone sold one as the other and no one understood (or cared as long as they were in the right part of the pyramid) about it. I'm not 100% sure that Helium didn't have an actual use case that could have made sense for some applications far better than say Verizon doing the same thing. Whether that was ultimately the intention of the people involved at the core or whether it could have happened in the token/crypto/ponzi/flipper domain, I don't know. I have seen a lot of decentralized models that may have made sense in a certain domain get crushed under the pressure of some people getting rich quick or using a business model for taken speculation.