Decentralized Wireless for All

Decentralized Wireless for All – Helium brings The People’s Network to the DAWN Black Box

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TLDR:

• Helium × DAWN Partnership: DAWN is integrating Helium connectivity across its Black Box devices, and all future devices, enabling small businesses,venues and households to easily participate in earning for providing decentralized wireless coverage.

• Problem: Traditional LTE and 5G mobile infrastructure is costly, limiting rapid expansion and making it uneconomical to reach many underserved areas.
  
  
• Helium’s Unique Value: Helium aggregates decentralized wireless coverage, making it seamlessly accessible to mobile carriers through Passpoint. Today, they operate the world's largest aggregated user-owned wireless network, driving unmatched scale and coverage economics.

‍The people are building a new Internet—one household, and one Black Box at a time. As a decentralized Internet moves from possibility to inevitability, certain core technologies and protocols emerge as essential foundations of this landscape. In this series, we explore these history-defining protocols, highlighting their unique roles in enabling a consumer-owned digital, why each is indispensable, and how the Black Box is designed specifically to bring their benefits directly to households.‍

If you’re reading about DAWN, you certainly know about Helium, the original DePIN pioneers. Helium has led the Decentralized Wireless (DeWi) movement since day one, challenging the original Goliaths – the mobile carriers. They’ve forever changed how mobile networks are built, and made crypto relatable to millions of people. 

The vision of The People’s Network is well known, but today, Helium is hitting its stride. It’s approaching a significant inflection point as the model gets serious traction with multiple carriers, coverage scales, and economics shift decisively in their favor. If you picture the decentralized Internet of the future, it’s hard to imagine a world without Helium, and as is the case for all Black Box partners, it comes down to technology. 

The Power of Passpoint

At the heart of Helium’s success so far, and their long-term inevitability, is a technology called Passpoint. Passpoint allows Wi-Fi networks to seamlessly become part of the mobile infrastructure. By aggregating thousands of user-owned hotspots, Helium sells carriers access to high-demand coverage with user-powered hotspots.

Leveraging Passpoint means Helium can easily integrate existing commercial and residential Wi-Fi networks into its coverage. It's an elegant solution that they’ve been focusing on as of late – recruit existing Wi-Fi networks to rapidly scale. 

Why Wi-Fi Wins

And why Wi-Fi? Because Wi-Fi chipsets are, by far, the cheapest wireless hardware available today and for the foreseeable future. Thanks to their massive global production volume, nothing can compare. LTE and 5G radios require specialized hardware, expensive spectrum licenses, and costly deployments. Wi-Fi, in contrast, leverages hardware that's already abundant, inexpensive, and readily available. This crucial advantage allows Helium to onboard networks quickly, dramatically reducing their cost of deployment and enabling rapid coverage expansion.

Consumers and small businesses are perfect for filling small-medium scale but strategically vital coverage gaps—the exact spots incumbent mobile providers find difficult and uneconomical to serve. 

With all of this context, it’s clear that Helium’s choice of Wi-Fi as its foundation is the right path. It ensures quick deployment precisely where coverage is needed most, with the cheapest hardware available, and can leverage already existing WiFi networks to grow rapidly.

Helium’s Powerful Flywheel

Why does this matter so much? Because Helium’s infrastructure choice directly impacts the economics of their mobile service. Helium Mobile isn't just another MVNO, it's an MHNO—a hybrid model that combines traditional carrier networks with Helium’s decentralized infrastructure. This model lowers their cost of goods sold (COGS) so they can sustainably offer unmatched services like 3GB of mobile data a  month for $0—a model nearly impossible for traditional MVNOs to replicate, let alone maintain profitably.

And now we get to the heart of Helium’s inevitability in a decentralized Internet – this creates a powerful flywheel effect, and the free phone plan is a perfect example of that. Better economics means greater incentives to expand coverage, which leads to more hotspots, more roaming capacity, and even lower costs. As their COGS continue improving, Helium’s growth accelerates, creating a self-reinforcing network effect that makes The People’s Network increasingly valuable. And with Wi-Fi technology continually improving—faster speeds, lower latency, and expanded frequency like 6GHz—Helium’s infrastructure grows even more valuable over time. 

The bottom line is simple – LTE and 5G Networks are too expensive to create coverage everywhere. Passpoint with Wi-Fi is the most effective way to bridge that gap. And there is no one out there who is even close to leading this space the same way that Helium is.

Helium × DAWN: A Fully Decentralized Physical Internet

This inevitability is exactly why DAWN is so excited about partnering with Helium. Helium’s technology will be integrated by default across all DAWN equipment across the US and Mexico, making The People’s Network instantly accessible to anyone deploying DAWN hardware. Whether you’re setting up a single Black Box in your local neighborhood or expanding coverage to an entire commercial space using DAWN’s access points, you’ll seamlessly become part of Helium’s growing network. Those familiar with DAWN’s origin story already know how deeply Helium has inspired our vision from the start, and it’s genuinely an honor for us to partner with the pioneers who first made decentralized wireless a reality.

"Helium’s technology will be integrated by default across all DAWN equipment, making the People’s Network instantly accessible to anyone deploying DAWN hardware. Wherever you’re setting up a DAWN Black Box in the US or Mexico, you’ll seamlessly become part of Helium’s growing network, with the ability in commercial spaces to enable carrier offload.” said Mario Di Dio, GM of Network at Helium.