Helium is a novel crowd sourced LoRa LPWAN network which uses Sub-GHz ISM bands (868MHz for EU, 915MHz for US).

The network nodes, known as ‘hotspots’, are owned and operated by individuals who are incentivised with crypto currency ($HNT). A hotspot will ‘mine’ $HNT when it can see other hotspots, known as Proof-of-coverage (POC).

Put simply, the better your coverage, the more money you make.

As a result, propagation expertise is in high demand which is where we come in 🙂

Helium has been growing for years but 2021 saw a surge in growth (see $HNT price below) which caused us to review the free plan to maintain QoS. A good problem to have all the same..

HELIUM VISION

The excitement around $HNT has been matched with a flurry of Helium hotspot businesses. The most mature of these is helium.vision (HV) owned by USMC vet and professional developer Nick Hough. We partnered with HV to add CloudRF’s API to https://app.helium.vision so HV customers could have everything in one place.

HV used the area API and LoRa templates to generate API requests from their own map. PNG images were then overlaid and stored locally. The beauty of this implementation is if a customer tries the same building, the result loads up instantly as it’s locally cached and no repeat load is sent to the CloudRF API.

We’re working with HV to add more APIs, including our new fast points API. Watch this space..