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One aspect I don't see discussed as much is the shutting down of the infrastructure used for the IoT. 3G/4G/5G/etc. were all pitched as revolutionizing connecti

One aspect I don't see discussed as much is the shutting down of the infrastructure used for the IoT. 3G/4G/5G/etc. were all pitched as revolutionizing connections for more than just cell phones. But these devices, such as refrigerated truck remote monitoring, older vehicle OnStar, many depend on 3G. This is going hand-in-hand with browsers increasingly putting up roadblocks to configuring said IoT devices. Guess what? The tiny device setup webserver on my low power embedded device isn't going to be able to https sorry. So now you have to dismiss more and more warning dialogs.

gymbeaux 3y ago
My conspiracy theory is that cell carriers knew IoT was DOA but wanted to get as much funding from the federal government as possible. I suspect this because of how eager they are to deprecate old networks to repurpose the spectrum for high-revenue “premium 5G” devices like smartwatches and cars with built in hotspots… and because of how difficult it was for me to actually get an IoT device on one of the networks. Verizon basically said “fuck off unless you’re an enterprise company”, T-Mobile said something similar, and AT&T was pricey (they were all probably pricey)- something like $10 for 1MB/month. Like come the fuck on, it costs less than a cent to transfer 1MB of data over your decrepit EDGE network. Is the Helium network a viable replacement for IoT devices? It’s a crypto thing but you earn the crypto by hosting a Helium “hotspot”, which is a LoRa (915MHz in the US) radio that actually has decent coverage and building penetration- of course the speeds are comparable dial-up, but that should suffice for IoT.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  Can Helium compete with Amazon's Sidewalk (also LoRa) though? Democratizing the network is nice, but when the hardware costs so much, I'm not sure they can build the network fast enough compared to Amazon building it into Echo devices everywhere. Also Helium doesn't let me use my own LoRa radios, so I'm not even sure I consider that democratizing it. It still feels like it's a network that belongs to Helium rather than individuals
  - gymbeaux 3y ago
    I hadn't heard of Sidewalk so I had to do some research. It sounds like a better Helium network. I mean you're right, getting a Helium hotspot is difficult and you can't just use any old LoRa radio, it needs to be one whitelisted by the Helium network. The whole think smelled like a scam back in ~2019 when I saw ads for it. Pay ~$300, give away your Internet to these IoT devices, but in exchange get some fake Internet money. I think it's impressive that Amazon managed to deploy what at a glance looks like an identical network with superior coverage without all the blockchain/crypto bullshit... AND it's free for non-Amazon devices to use. I'm pretty sure Helium costs some fake token money to consume data from. One concern I had was if someone were to use an IoT device to use my Internet connection to download CP. I don't think it's pragmatic, but there are lots of dumb people on this Earth and I can pretty much guarantee someone, somewhere is going to try it, and the poor guy hosting that Helium hotspot is going to have to lawyer up and probably have his computers seized until law enforcement figures out what happened. Same applies to other illegal activities. Imagine if the ransomware attack on that US company that resulted in them paying some amount of Bitcoin... that transaction was made on a random IoT device connected to someone's Helium hotspot. How would the FBI track that one down? Perhaps, then, that is a/the benefit of Helium over Sidewalk, because presumably Amazon will comply with any/all requests from government/law enforcement for data on which devices connected to what and when. With Helium, I'm not sure the FBI would have been able to figure out anything beyond the county and state the ransomware host collected his Bitcoin ransom at.
    - ThatPlayer 3y ago
      I think you're overestimating how much bandwidth LoRa can handle. Because of airtime fairness, you're only allowed to be transmitting about 1% of the time. Best case LoRa is about 253 kb/s. 1% is 864 seconds, for a total of 25 megabytes a day. That would probably require you to be right next to the transmitter. Real world usages is going to be closer to single digit kilobits/second, maybe 1 megabyte/day. Also because of how Bitcoin is P2P, it's impossible to declare where the transaction is coming from. Transactions are all cryptographically signed and freely shared between nodes until picked up by miners. To figure out who the original sender is, you would need to host the majority of nodes so that the sender gives you the transaction first. Even then you can't prove they are the original sender rather than a rebroadcaster. There's a also few services that will broadcast a transaction for you: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_broadcasting https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_broadcasting I don't disagree with you that Helium (or any crypto) is a scam. I couldn't dissuade one of my friends from buying the hotspots, and he has not made any money on them. There's also some sentiment that "Amazon should be paying me for the bandwidth they're using!" with Sidewalk. Also I don't think networks like Amazon Sidewalk or Helium get direct access to the internet: they wanna go through Amazon's API or Helium's to be able to charge the company fees for the broadcast. Probably to track and log it too since it's only a few bytes anyways.

gymbeaux 3y ago

My conspiracy theory is that cell carriers knew IoT was DOA but wanted to get as much funding from the federal government as possible. I suspect this because of how eager they are to deprecate old networks to repurpose the spectrum for high-revenue “premium 5G” devices like smartwatches and cars with built in hotspots… and because of how difficult it was for me to actually get an IoT device on one of the networks. Verizon basically said “fuck off unless you’re an enterprise company”, T-Mobile said something similar, and AT&T was pricey (they were all probably pricey)- something like $10 for 1MB/month. Like come the fuck on, it costs less than a cent to transfer 1MB of data over your decrepit EDGE network. Is the Helium network a viable replacement for IoT devices? It’s a crypto thing but you earn the crypto by hosting a Helium “hotspot”, which is a LoRa (915MHz in the US) radio that actually has decent coverage and building penetration- of course the speeds are comparable dial-up, but that should suffice for IoT.

ThatPlayer 3y ago
Can Helium compete with Amazon's Sidewalk (also LoRa) though? Democratizing the network is nice, but when the hardware costs so much, I'm not sure they can build the network fast enough compared to Amazon building it into Echo devices everywhere. Also Helium doesn't let me use my own LoRa radios, so I'm not even sure I consider that democratizing it. It still feels like it's a network that belongs to Helium rather than individuals
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  I hadn't heard of Sidewalk so I had to do some research. It sounds like a better Helium network. I mean you're right, getting a Helium hotspot is difficult and you can't just use any old LoRa radio, it needs to be one whitelisted by the Helium network. The whole think smelled like a scam back in ~2019 when I saw ads for it. Pay ~$300, give away your Internet to these IoT devices, but in exchange get some fake Internet money. I think it's impressive that Amazon managed to deploy what at a glance looks like an identical network with superior coverage without all the blockchain/crypto bullshit... AND it's free for non-Amazon devices to use. I'm pretty sure Helium costs some fake token money to consume data from. One concern I had was if someone were to use an IoT device to use my Internet connection to download CP. I don't think it's pragmatic, but there are lots of dumb people on this Earth and I can pretty much guarantee someone, somewhere is going to try it, and the poor guy hosting that Helium hotspot is going to have to lawyer up and probably have his computers seized until law enforcement figures out what happened. Same applies to other illegal activities. Imagine if the ransomware attack on that US company that resulted in them paying some amount of Bitcoin... that transaction was made on a random IoT device connected to someone's Helium hotspot. How would the FBI track that one down? Perhaps, then, that is a/the benefit of Helium over Sidewalk, because presumably Amazon will comply with any/all requests from government/law enforcement for data on which devices connected to what and when. With Helium, I'm not sure the FBI would have been able to figure out anything beyond the county and state the ransomware host collected his Bitcoin ransom at.
  - ThatPlayer 3y ago
    I think you're overestimating how much bandwidth LoRa can handle. Because of airtime fairness, you're only allowed to be transmitting about 1% of the time. Best case LoRa is about 253 kb/s. 1% is 864 seconds, for a total of 25 megabytes a day. That would probably require you to be right next to the transmitter. Real world usages is going to be closer to single digit kilobits/second, maybe 1 megabyte/day. Also because of how Bitcoin is P2P, it's impossible to declare where the transaction is coming from. Transactions are all cryptographically signed and freely shared between nodes until picked up by miners. To figure out who the original sender is, you would need to host the majority of nodes so that the sender gives you the transaction first. Even then you can't prove they are the original sender rather than a rebroadcaster. There's a also few services that will broadcast a transaction for you: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_broadcasting https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_broadcasting I don't disagree with you that Helium (or any crypto) is a scam. I couldn't dissuade one of my friends from buying the hotspots, and he has not made any money on them. There's also some sentiment that "Amazon should be paying me for the bandwidth they're using!" with Sidewalk. Also I don't think networks like Amazon Sidewalk or Helium get direct access to the internet: they wanna go through Amazon's API or Helium's to be able to charge the company fees for the broadcast. Probably to track and log it too since it's only a few bytes anyways.