As far as I can see there are currently 19 approved device manufacturers [0].
> It essentially operates as a unregistered and unregulated ISP and that isn’t something to be taken lightly. It does that by pushing all legal and regulatory liability to operators. There’s also a lot of scams with operators faking their signal etc.
Scams faking their signal will only help improve the robustness of the network on the long run as these are fixable issues.
Regulation seems to be spurring on every web3 conversation. I believe regulation is lagging behind user adoption and is a pending conversation. As for the exact scenario (LORA network) what kind of regulation do we __want__ the network to have? I don't think blocking user traffic is something we want to have, as an example you mentioned with current ISPs.
This isn’t about Web3 though - Starlink for eg started accepted beta signups in India without a ISP license and was forced to go back on that. This is exactly kind of regulatory questions that Uber brought with it and it deserves the same level of scrutiny. Uber for eg, was forced to get a Taxi license in various jurisdictions.
Nice to see that they have more manufacturers though.
It essentially operates as a unregistered and unregulated ISP and that isn’t something to be taken lightly. It does that by pushing all legal and regulatory liability to operators. There’s also a lot of scams with operators faking their signal etc.
Running a node also likely violates your ISPs ToS - can you contractually resell bandwidth?, so it has similar concerns as what AirBnB etc for the housing market.
There’s nothing stopping something large ISPs from blocking Helium traffic and/or suspending customers for running a node. Alternatively, if this gets big enough, you’ll see ISPs offer LORA hotspots of their own.
Ultimately, it is a very much VC-funded company running regulatory arbitrage on a global scale by using crypto instead. It’s the same if Uber decided to pay drivers in UberBucks a decade ago - that doesn’t change the offering, it just makes it easier to scale while pushing off any regulatory liabilities (including taxation).