Helium in the Era of 5G Networks

This post was written by Tom Shaughnessy, Co-Founder of Delphi Digital, in collaboration with guest author Tyler Reynolds, an independent crypto investor.

Helium: Opportunity and Challenges In Entering the 5G Market

A few years ago, Helium just clicked. The idea that a wireless startup could potentially bootstrap a global IoT network, without spending any money on capex (climbing a single tower), was truly revolutionary. The thesis wasn’t rocket science: users were incentivized to purchase a node ($450) and would earn HNT tokens in exchange for bootstrapping the supply side of the network by providing IoT coverage. The token also clicked, as HNT increased in price, it converted into more data credits to use the network (each DC costs $0.00001). Holding HNT became a claim over future data usage whether it be IoT, or in the future new wireless standards like 5G. 

Today Helium has over 470,000 nodes around the world providing IoT coverage, but the real story in our opinion is 5G and addressing the potential challenges Helium faces to become not a replacement for wireless carriers, but a complement to them in the road to 5G.

Helium has successfully bootstrapped its IoT network and now companies are in a position to actually use the network given coverage is sufficient; if you are tracking a Brinks truck, you don’t want to lose the signal. While the supply side of the IoT network has been successfully bootstrapped, usage is very limited at this time. We will expand more on this later in this post.

5G Story Time

The 5G logo on the top right of your phone is currently a marketing gimmick. If you want to see if the logo on the top of your phone means anything, see if your phone can download 1-10Gbps. The promise of 5G is 1-10 Gbps download speeds with latency under 1 m/s. 4G offers around 30-100 Mbps of download speed in the wild with anywhere from 50-200 m/s latency depending on your source and conditions.  

Wireless networks are extremely complicated beasts. Below is a very simplified example showing the interplay between an end-user on the right obtaining a wireless