- Helium CEO Mario Di Dio sees some striking resemblances between SpaceX’s approach and that of Helium’s
- Both are pursuing strategies that avoid the largest expense of mobility: deploying a macro terrestrial network
- Of course, SpaceX is a different game entirely and far from anything else the U.S. mobile industry has seen thus far
SpaceX’s plans in the mobile sector are sparking all kinds of reactions, from those questioning how it’s going to make a go of it to those who think it’s the best thing to happen in telecom since Marty Cooper’s first cell phone call.
For Helium CEO Mario Di Dio, SpaceX’s strategy validates what Helium has been trying to do in the mobile space for years.
“It’s pretty clear that Starlink and SpaceX have been thinking about launching their mobile services in a different way than a traditional model, and to me that's what resonated,” he told Fierce.
Specifically, he’s referring to something SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said during the company’s Q2 earnings call last week. She side-stepped a question about capex but alluded to how they could avoid spending billions on low-band spectrum by putting cellular base stations or femtocells at the same location as Starlink broadband dishes.
That way, you’d kind of have “these little femtocells around the country, and you deploy that as you need it,” Shotwell said.
It’s very similar to what Helium is doing, in the sense that it’s taken a “decentralized” approach. The difference, of course, is Helium isn’t a $1.93 trillion company that’s deploying a mega constellation of satellites.
Helium’s strategy is decidedly more down to earth, using Wi-Fi access points to share connectivity. The direct consumer-facing side of the brand, Helium Mobile, was sold to Andrew Yang’s Noble Mobile earlier this year for an undisclosed sum.
However, Helium Network lives on, serving millions of subscribers every day through relationships with carriers like T-Mobile and AT&T, as well as MVNOs like Noble Mobile. Helium’s network includes Wi-Fi hotspots that people install in their homes or businesses; they earn cryptocurrency rewards in return for providing coverage.
Soon after the deal with Noble Mobile was announced, Di Dio was named CEO of Helium Network, where he continues to work on growing the ecosystem.
Helium: Coverage where you need it
“This idea of deploying coverage as you need it is something that we’ve been trying to do at Helium for quite a while,” which is to say, “let’s try to figure out how we can grow the network where that demand is,” Di Dio said.
“We think on a much more microscopic level about the coverage needs and we serve that coverage where it’s needed,” he added.
Indeed, Fierce heard this theme from Di Dio well before SpaceX launched its IPO and publicly shared its terrestrial mobile strategy during its first earnings conference call. According to Di Dio, there’s no “winner take all” when it comes to connectivity. Wi-Fi, LTE/5G, distributed antenna systems (DAS) and satellites are all part of the mix – and maybe more.
Naturally, the lack of details on SpaceX’s plans for Starlink Mobile leaves a lot of room for speculation, from the types of roaming it may or may not need with existing terrestrial carriers to whether the end game is really robots, AI and autonomous driving.
“The biggest takeaway for me is that they are thinking about building the network with a different concept in which you start from the demand” and go from there, Di Dio said. “What I'm fundamentally aligned with is that in 2026, there is a different way of building a service platform, and the way in which you build a service platform is to merge the signals from demand on the ground with whichever technology is available to you, and we go back to this idea of convergence.”
SpaceX and Helium’s shared aspirations
Despite their obvious differences, SpaceX and Helium share the desire to avoid the largest expense of a mobile network: bringing up and operating cell sites, which entails site acquisition, zoning, leasing, power, backhaul and macro radio deployment and maintenance, all of which are very expensive.
“Both Helium and SpaceX’s models borrow real estate that exists and use similar approaches with femtocells or small cells to provide a radius of coverage. So, dishes, gateways and Superchargers with satellite backhaul for SpaceX, and subscriber premises and broadband for Helium,” said analyst Roy Chua, founder of AvidThink.
“Both do share a major issue: their radio sites (with limited radius) are based on where existing customers have installed hardware (and Superchargers), and then the coverage follows the existing install base. That may or may not correlate with actual traffic demand, and that creates a potential gap,” Chua told Fierce.
“The economics have to work out for dense coverage in urban areas and reliable indoor coverage. As an industry, we’ve tried host-based deployment many times: femtocells, community Wi-Fi, cable’s strand-mount CBRS. But the coverage with macro cells seems to keep winning the economic argument,” he added.
Helium’s prospects in cyber land
Interestingly, Chua said he was personally one of the supporters of the earlier version of the Helium network that entailed buying FreedomFi CBRS small cell and gateway products and running a service at home, hoping to pick up users from the nearby park and earning cryptocurrency.
However, that endeavor “never made a cent.”
Going forward, Helium’s offload strategy could prove difficult as operators adopt improved signal processing algorithms with AI/machine learning and realize better mid-band penetration and 5G-Advanced technologies.
In addition, their incentive structure based on Helium’s HNT token is still challenging.
“Historically, the price of HNT was between $0.11 and $2.00 in 2020. Then the crypto bubble inflated rapidly; HNT surged alongside it to around $55 in November 2021. After the 2022-2023 deflation and continuing crypto chill, it’s dropped dramatically. In the last twelve months, it’s gone from $3 to $0.18,” Chua said.
“So it’s still looking like challenging economics for at least the foreseeable future,” he added.
Helium soldiers on
Circling back to Helium’s Di Dio, he’s not deterred by the crypto situation. And he doesn’t anticipate SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile competing directly with Helium.
Far from it. “From my perspective, we're open to collaborate with anybody, and so if SpaceX wants to collaborate and wants to use our network to start serving their customers once their service is up, we will be definitely up for that,” he said.
For now, Helium is busy building tools that will allow carriers to manage the consumer experience seamlessly. “Our job continues to create those tools and to make the network continue to grow in the U.S. as well as abroad, in Mexico, in Brazil, and in other geographies,” he said. “More news to come soon.”
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