Helium Mobile today has announced Helium Plus. This service allows any business or public Wi-Fi provider to help expand reliable, community-driven wireless service in the U.S. and Mexico. Helium’s people-powered networks have traditionally been set up through the creation of physical Hotspots. With Helium Plus, businesses and public Wi-Fi providers can do a software update on the routers they have now and join the network with no additional hardware required.
With Helium Plus, hundreds of thousands of new contributors can help drive the expansion of the Helium network. Cafes, shopping malls, and others can help support this decentralized wireless system, provide connectivity, and earn HNT Tokens. Helium Network Tokens are the native cryptocurrency of the Helium Network.
Your phone will automatically and seamlessly connect to the Wi-Fi connection, switching from cellular without requiring you to connect to Wi-Fi manually. Heck, you won’t even need a type in a password to make the switch. Once offloaded,your phone’s data traffic (browsing, streaming, using an app, etc.) is routed through the Wi-Fi network’s internet connection instead of using bandwidth on the cellular towers.
Mario Di Dio, Network General Manager at Helium, says, “Helium Plus represents a major leap forward in how businesses can contribute to the Helium Network. It offers instant, low-cost wireless integration, reducing infrastructure costs while creating new revenue streams and improving connectivity. The simplicity of our process is key to unlocking the full potential of this expansion.”
As we’ve said before in an attempt to get the point across, the incentive in Helium’s program is that the individuals or businesses hosting the Wi-Fi Hotspots that allow the offload (like the aforementioned cafes or malls) earn cryptocurrency, Helium Network Tokens, as a reward for providing this service. With Helium Plus, instead of setting up the Hotspot, a company or organization can simply use a software update to use their routers to deliver Wi-Fi and get paid for doing so.
The carriers don’t mind offloading data if network traffic is too congested and demand for data is heavy. Think of the cell traffic at the Super Bowl, for example. By offloading some of the data to Wi-Fi, it opens up cellular bandwidth, delivering better performance to those who stay on the carrier’s cellular network.
