By Riley Kaminer
How much do you pay for your cell phone service? If you’re anything like the average American, you’re spending $144 a month (upwards of $1,700 a year!) for something that is much closer to a necessity than a luxury.
That is until Helium Mobile came along. The service, provided by parent company Nova Labs, offers unlimited talk, text, and data for just $5 a month – no contract required. Its first demo? Miami, of course.
How do they offer this service at such a low price? You can thank the blockchain for that. Helium Mobile is powered in part by the Helium Network, which is a decentralized patchwork of individuals who provide the network with connectivity and get paid in crypto in return. When Helium Mobile subscribers are out of range of one of these providers, they hop onto T-Mobile’s coverage network.
“Helium Mobile represents a new category of cellular providers using what we call dynamic coverage, which is both traditional and legacy cell service, combined with people-powered cell towers,” Nova Labs COO Frank Mong told Refresh Miami.
“In parallel, today we’re starting to sell something called Helium Mobile Hotspots,” Mong continued. “These are essentially consumer grade or small medium business grade, easy to use, easy to install cell towers that you can put in your store or put in areas where there’s heavy foot traffic, so that people on phones can connect.”
“The idea is to connect those users to the people power cell towers that’s operating off of a crypto economy,” Mong added, drawing parallels between Helium Mobile and other two-sided marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb.
“Having subscribers use the Helium Mobile network is far less expensive than using our partner T-Mobile’s network,” explained Mong. So as it adds users over time, the network will become increasingly efficient.
Nova Labs does not see itself as a crypto or a blockchain company per se. Rather, in Mong’s view: “It’s about whether we can produce a better product or service using crypto, leveraging decentralization.” Customer satisfaction is top of mind, with Nova Labs focusing on making their tech easy to use. Nova Labs, which originally launched as Helium Systems Inc., has been around for approximately 10 years.
Helium Mobile has not made their exact number of users public, but according to Mong it is in the thousands. He said their current user base is diverse but tends to skew young and tech-forward. The company put out an X (formerly Twitter) poll to determine where to roll out its service first, and Miami was the resounding choice. Nova Labs does not have a physical headquarters and its 100 employees are globally dispersed, but Mong said that there is a major hub in Miami.
In the near future, Mong is excited to keep building the momentum behind Helium Mobile. But looking further ahead, he signaled that we can expect to see more IoT innovation to come from Nova Labs. “We have some exciting use cases to come.”
Pictured at top of post: A Helium Mobile Hotspot device.
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