Over the summer, I got really interested in the Helium network. Unlike many other crypto-backed projects, there was something at least of articulable value being provided by the project. In short, the promise of the Helium network is in building a two-sided market. On one side, there are hosts, or people that are running small hubs with antennas at their homes. These hubs use their antenna to transmit and receive LoRaWAN packets, and then forward those packets through the host's existing WiFi/internet connection to a centralized message passing service. Then, clients can access this patchwork of hubs, distributed globally, to send LoRa messages to hubs that are then relayed through the internet.
At scale, the promise of the Helium network is a cooperatively owned, global long range / low bandwidth / low power message passing network ideal for IoT devices. Unlike traditional uses of LoRa, because this is a global, cooperatively owned network, it would be possible to deploy LoRa devices in ways not practicable before. For instance, a typical usage would be on a farm where some central hub is receiving messages from IoT devices quite literally in the field, measuring things like acidity, water saturation, sunlight intensity, and so forth. Using that type of telemetric information, the centralized system could then make decisions about how to apply fertilizers, alter irrigation channels, set up shades, etc, and overall, drastically increase the efficiency of an agricultural endeavor.
These "typical" uses of LoRaWAN technology, however, are all silo'ed, hub-and-spoke approaches - devices report back to, and receive messages from, a singular or very small number of centralized systems, and the small network does not speak to other devices in the field. The promise of Helium is to liberate LoRaWAN telemetric devices from geographic constraints - if there's a reasonable expectation that nearly anywhere you travel, there will likely be a hub within reporting distance, then you could have devices traveling long distances without worrying about signal loss.
Apple's AirTags are similar to this, but have a critical flaw - they depend on a trillion dollar company having been so successful to the point where, because their billions of devices have proliferated across the planet like a weed, you're never that far from someone's device. Because of that, AirTags simply piggyback off whatever the nearest bluetooth device is to send an anonymized location beacon through those devices back through the internet. It's a "cooperative" network in that all our devices work together to emit these small packets of information, but it would be impossible to build this from whole cloth without the path dependency of 50 years of Apple being Apple.
In lieu of this, a financially motivated cooperative network makes sense - every hub owner on the Helium network is getting some tokens back for hosting their devices - simply by having them online, they are making some "passive" "income" (obviously extremely load-bearing words, this is crypto still) and are "incentivized" to build the patchwork network. In theory, the collective belief that the network will grow is self-reinforcing - over time, that could lead to a runaway proliferation of the network. In turn, once the network is established, LoRaWAN clients could send messages through these hubs, and remunerate the hubs their messages pass through with micro-transactions in the cryptocurrency.
This set of features is well-positioned to disrupt the existing world of legacy fleet/asset tracking devices. Companies like Azuga, TeleTrac, and Rhino Fleet Tracking use cell based networks to transmit their messages. This has two major shortcomings - first, its a much more "high power" network to send data through, and so drains the device battery for a fleet tracking device such that many fleet tracking devices are usually required to be plugged into some other power source, and second, that network is potentially much more expensive than the Helium network, since it's a more complicated more centralized network. So, during operation, the fleet tracking devices cost more "money", or energy, and during message transmission they incur more cost. Could you disrupt that market by hopping on top of Helium and sending messages on lower-powered, cheaper transmission networks?
I decided to spend a bit of time exploring that idea. that resulted in my fork of the otherwise derelict LoRaWAN Github Repository, and resulted in the init script I built to initialize clean Raspberry Pi prototype devices with builds of a tracking system. To build your own implementation, please take a look at that code, contact me any time, and also enjoy some of these proof of concept screenshots / photos!