There has been a great upheaval in the IoT ecosystem in recent years and that is not surprising. Such devices can be of great use in many sectors, including but not limited to agriculture, healthcare, smart cities and in our homes.
Many of those devices come on the form of dedicated sensors. They can detect all kinds of parameters and send them to centralized systems.
Of course, you need a stable and reliable network that can support the multitude of devices. It’s hard to depend on traditional telecom solutions as they are not very affordable and sometimes can’t provide the needed coverage. And there is an effective alternative,
Helium, decentralized solution
based on the LoRaWAN standard, which is used by many IoT products.
Helium already has over 800 000 active hotspots that provide coverage mainly in the USA, Europe, the Middle East and China. In it a sensor can cost mere cents to run a year. The security of the network is guaranteed by the open-source technology that is used in its core.
Complete decentralization
They call Helium – People’s network and that is for a reason. Everyone can be a part of the network, providing coverage, by installing and running a personal hotspot miner. Those devices generate the cryptocurrency HNT while providing network coverage, thus earning money for their owners. The hotspot miners can be bought from companies like HeliumMart.
Right now Helium is migrating the network to a new type of hotspot, called Light Hotspot. The purpose of this migration is to make it faster and more efficient.
The good news is that those devices are power-efficient and don’t use that much electricity as the traditional GPU mining rigs. Mining HNT is easily done by just installing a simple device on your window. Hotspots provide miles of wireless network coverage for millions of devices around you using Helium LongFi and only uses 5W of energy.
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