Why are antennas popping up all over the foothills? SLC seeks to solve mystery

Re:Why are antennas popping up all over the foothills? SLC s... by walrus01 on Thursday January 05, 2023 @04:18PM (#34266726)

Anecdotally, rooftop telecom site operators, tower owners and WISPs have been approached by "helium" miner people for several years now, they're almost universally laughed at as a non plausible business plan and revenue source.

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Re:Why are antennas popping up all over the foothills? SLC s... by vorpalhex on Thursday January 05, 2023 @05:34PM (#34267870)

Somewhere in there is a gem of a good idea. Incentivize operators of a mesh network where you can buy credits to get data on the mesh. Like I can see the concept and in it's raw form it's exciting.

Helium though got way overpriced and insane with the crypto bubble.

Maybe they can rectify it and turn sane? I'd love a world where all this deployed helium hardware isn't trash.

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Re:Why are antennas popping up all over the foothills? SLC s... by walrus01 on Thursday January 05, 2023 @05:36PM (#34267904)

LoRA as a method to implement serial bridges over very narrow channels and low RSL/CINR rates in radio is fine. LoRAWAN and similar are fine. Lots of possible applications. The crypto part is what's truly bizarre.

I don't know how anyone who has spent any time researching bulk-data-service plans for embedded multi-band cat1 LTE radios (a few bucks a month from Verizon or Tmobile per radio) would think that a less reliable, vastly less-covered-area "helium" thing would be something you could rely on for actual traffic to/from your equipment.

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Re:Why are antennas popping up all over the foothills? SLC s... by RF_Savage on Saturday January 07, 2023 @12:27PM (#34290308)

They looked at The Things Network and figured that they could do better by paying node operators in their own funbux as an incentive to host nodes. It worked, just that the customers did not materialize.

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Re:Why are antennas popping up all over the foothills? SLC s... by klinquist on Thursday January 05, 2023 @06:00PM (#34268203)

I, as an airbnb owner, was approached by someone wanting to give me a "router to put in my window for IoT sensors."

Didn't take me long to figure out it was Helium.

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Re:Why are antennas popping up all over the foothills? SLC s... by rchaud on Friday January 06, 2023 @10:46AM (#34275985)

How much did they offer?

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Re:Why are antennas popping up all over the foothills? SLC s... by klinquist on Friday January 06, 2023 @05:57PM (#34282572)

zero. Just looking for "volunteers" to help "grow IoT sensor networks."

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