Helium talk at the AllThingsOpen conference and the access points

I attended a talk today titled "Telcos aren't the future. You are." at the AllThingsOpen conference on a new open network being deployed by a company called Helium that is open source hardware/software as well as blockchain and cryptocurrency driven.

Here's the synopsis from the AllThingsOpen website:

The talk was given by Coco Tang and was extremely interesting.

I may have some things wrong, but from my understanding, this technology is aimed to connect IoT devices using the 900MHz unlicensed bands using a newly created protocol called LongFi that is good for over a mile of connectivity to the IoT devices that will connect. The incentive for deploying one of these access points is .... you guessed it .... you earn the cryptocurrency called Helium. Apparently, this is a brand new crypto that will be awarded for both users connecting to your access point as well as your access point mining the crypto. I don't know how much this crypto will be worth or if there will ever be a ROI on the access point investment. They are available for ~ $500, or you can roll your own since the software and hardware specs are open source.

There was also a special because of the conference, so I ordered one of the access points. I'll be sure to do another post to discuss my experience with it.

From what I was told at the talk, if you have some IoT devices that would connect to your own access point, it would essentially be free to connect to your own access point because you would earn as much as it costs to connect, so it's a zero sum game for you.

More info can be found on the Helium website - https://www.helium.com/hotspot

Also, they look fairly active on twitter - https://twitter.com/helium