Tag Archives: LoRaWAN

Helium console, is it a $6600 business ?

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Some time ago, a twitter thread made the community react about the amount of $6600 of communications consumption on the Helium network. This thread was full of approximations in order to present negatively the growth of the Helium network. But it is also an opportunity to take stock of the development of the use of the network. We will see in this article who operates the Helium decentralized network, what are the current data volumes and what are the associated financial metrics.

In short, we cannot talk about Nova Labs’ revenue with respect to direct communication costs because these costs are associated with different third parties offering the packet routing service. We cannot rely on this cost to estimate an associated business volume because there are many indirect costs as I have already specified in my blog post analyzing the running costs of a Helium router/console. Finally, regarding a long period where gamers found a way to earn a few dollars on the back of Nova Labs, involving many ancillary costs, distorted the data for June. You will understand all this in the rest of the article.

Disclaimer: I’m the owner of the public helium console helium-iot.eu (oui 6) – no need to makes comment like “he have written this because he own … blablabla”

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Monitor Helium Router / Console

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The Helium router (aka console) is the LoRaWan network server. In a previous post I described how to setup a Helium router / console. In this post I will give you some details of what you can see in the grafana monitoring dashboard and this will help you to understand better how the network works to process the LoRaWan packets. We are going to detail what is an offer, a packet and the different monitoring information we can get from the router.

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Roaming LoRaWan with Helium network

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Helium is an open network, decentralized, there is a wide range of option you can do as a user, like creating your own private router to have your devices encrypted end-to-end. You can also make your LoRaWan traffic to be routed from Helium network to your own network when you are a LoRaWan network provider. Let’s take the exemple of a Telco with a LoRaWan network, let’s name it B’telco and imagine B’telco have an existing network in France. Imagine they want to extends their coverage worldwide, eventually reduce their local cost by removing some redundancy in the cities. In a such case, they can roam traffic over helium.

This means that the data of B’telco devices will be acquired by helium router, exactly as a Helium data, and then it will be routed to B’telco network server transparently. That way, the customer will have a better coverage and the B’telco cost for this worldwide extension will be really low.

In this blog post, I’ll explain how this roaming feature works and what is needed to deploy it.

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Debunk an LPWAN / IoT comparison

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The LPWAN comparison artwork

Recently, on Linkedin, I reacted on a publication that is looking like this one. I’m used to react on LPWAN publication when they are comparing technologies as this one. Comparing apples with eggs and usually meaningless. This one was particularly interesting me because, most of the content is non-sense and scientifically subject to discussion. I’ll detail it in this blog post.

It’s really interesting the way it has been made and also the way the author publish it, react on it on Linkedin and what objectif is serves : capture people in a world where the truth is adapted to make you think only one of the technologies serves all the possible use-cases and all the others are the worst existing. The purpose is to sell you some books and services. This is really looking like the way flat hearth believers, radio waves danger believers and other groups do to find adepts and to sell goods to them. It’s really funny to see and discuss.

As the Author of the original document above considers his slide as “art” you can’t use, copy, cut (even if he published it online on social network) I have made my own one and simplify it to not entering in the expecting promotion this guy is looking for and to troll on the social networks. The curve you see are the exact copy of the original one. These data seems to come from a university work and are needed to be debunked. I just not mention the highlighted technologies other than Sigfox and LoRaWan because they are the one the slide tries to discredit and we will see how that’s wrong.

I do not identify the original author of that “artistic work” because I consider the scientific aspect of that “work” so bad that it discredit too much this person, its student and the associated university, that I don’t want to discredit these people directly. As I did on Linked-in but the author has immediately identify itself to start its promotion.

As I did not had access to the full study, sources of these graph, I can’t tell if the initial work quality that as been done is bad or if the context of the experience is explained. May be the original document explains different conclusions, so I’ll try to not judge too much the original work that has been done. I’ll judge what the author of the slide gave to us, as a single slide with pseudo-scientific information and a fake conclusion. Apparently, if you are ready to pay for the book / register… , you can get more details, thing I do not want to do to feed the troll.

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SenseCAP M2, the Helium data-only hotspot, (close to be) ready-to-go

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Sensecap M2 – data only

Until now, all the Helium data-only hotspot I have been tested where DiY devices. They are not really complicated to manage but they are not ready-to-go, so you need to manually on-role them with a wallet and some complex CLI operation for the non-experts. This SenseCAP M2 is the first one I’m testing, ready-to-go or close to be ready-to-go (that does not means it is the only one existing).

As it is a Data-Only hotspot, it means it does not participate to the Proof of Coverage, as a consequence, there is no related rewards for this device. This device only earn the DC (Data Credit) for transferring the communications, so $1 for 100.000 packets. Before getting question, this have no return on invest in a crypto point of view. This has been made to help supporting professional applications on the Helium network.

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Helium solar hotspot (Data-Only) 2021 update

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In a previous blog post about 18 month ago, I designed my first Low Cost LoRaWAN Solar Gateway. This year, I did some updates to create a new version to support Helium Data-Only Hotspot (basically it works for any LoRaWAN networks like TheThingsNetwork).

In this version, I’m using a RAK wisegate Lite gateway, it is a bit more power consuming than the TTIG but can work on any LoRaWAN network. I’ve also changed the outdoor enclosure to get a larger and single battery.

You will also see that I’ve been updated the monitoring dashboard to get something better and free of charge. Two of them are in production. One is already deployed as an upgrade of the 1st one and the second one is in the testing phase. The First version has been on the field for more than a year. It has been offline about 10 days during that year, due to the weather conditions. This is a service level of 98,29% from its start until now. With the larger battery I’m expecting to resolve some of the small service interruption I’ve issued during last winter.

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Helium Kerlink Miner iFemToCell

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Kerlink Helium Miner iFemToCell

Kerlink is a LoRaWan hardware player since the first ages of this technology. This French company has equipped most of the operator’s network and is used to propose high quality industrial products.

The iFemToCell is not a new product. It exists since a couple of years and I already tested the IFemToCell 4 years ago. Recently the company has created a Helium edition we are going to review in this blog post.

This is an interesting device as it is a kind of hybrid between a light miner and a full miner. Even if the Kerlink platform is powerful, it is far away the power of a raspberry Pi and certain operations like consensus group can’t be performed. As this is now delegated to Validator, this difference have no impact on rewards. In another hand, this device is consuming less power and it is possible to power it with sun more easily. This is quite interesting.

Let see what is this device and what is specific during its deployment.

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Migrate any LoRaWAN gateway to helium network as a Data-Only hotspot

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Migrating existing LoRaWAN network to Helium or joining Helium for new deployment is accessing to the world largest LoRaWAN network and enable your devices to be deployed in the large covered zone. By doing this you extends the community network and as a counter part getting benefit on future data transfer and immediately get an access to the low cost ecosystem (data transfer, network server, high redundancy network…)

In a previous post I explained how to configure a RAK Wisgate as a Helium Data-Only hotspot. In a such situation your LoRaWAN gateway becomes a hotspot relaying the Helium traffic and getting some little rewards for the data transfer. The more important is to extend the coverage. This way of doing is good but I’ve got some issues on the field: The data transfer from the hotspot to the blockchain (even if just the state channels) is high and the software, currently in alpha, is not totally stable. When deploying a gateway is isolated area to provide new coverage, honestly, these two issues are blocking points.

The second important consideration is the existing gateways, already deployed on the field: they are currently used for private networks. They have been deployed some years ago and are not in the compatibility list of Helium hardware. Even if they are, deploying a new software on them, remotely can be a problem.

For these different reasons, I’ve been investigating a different approach by creating centrally hosted hotspots connected to different LoRaWAN gateways through the legacy Semtech protocol. This is what we are going to detail on this blog-post.

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