[Music]
okay
oh
good morning everyone appreciate y'all
being here at 10 a.m it's uh it's early
after last night but uh i'm
happy we didn't lose the entire room i'm
really excited to be here thank you for
coming here i'm hopefully going to
inform you a little bit entertain you a
little bit
about kind of my my niche in the kind of
blockchain crypto area so
uh what i really focus on are real world
service
service projects that have a watching or
crypto component to them so mostly
because i you know a little bit of old
school i remember when you know mining
bitcoin we kind of did it for fun with
uh with extra cpu cycles
rather than purely for like d5 profit so
this talk is really what i've been
working on for the past two years um
specifically the main project that i'm
going to talk about today has just
exploded it went from absolutely
you know nothing out there to
now this morning i saw they're almost at
800 000
um hot spots providing wireless coverage
all over the world
mostly in the united states
and also some clonesley's projects
coming up
so i did put on here part one because in
my opinion there's just not enough time
to really go into what i believe are the
long-term ramifications of this new
kind of take on
kind of these i don't really like the
word decentralizing i like the word
distributed a lot better of distributed
telecom where it rewards all the
stakeholders that are out there
so
you know who am i what do i know why am
i interested in this type of tech
you know i'm not going to say here i
know everything about a project out
there i would not be surprised at all if
somebody came up here or even during the
talk said oh have you heard of this
project
it's pretty much weekly or daily i hear
about another project out there that
provides some type of real service i'm
going to talk here about the ones that i
believe are more
more popular more well known in kind of
this niche area of real world services
but there are many more
that provide a variety of
basically tokens for weather data
for door traffic data
for temperature data for
air quality data there's a whole bunch
of these projects out there but for this
talk here i'm really going to focus on
the telecommunications projects because
i believe that those are going to have
the biggest impact over the next five to
ten years
so uh why am i into this kind of niche
of crypto why do i think it's
interesting uh why do i think it's
actually going somewhere
so mainly because i i spent quite a few
years working at verizon wireless
actually here in milwaukee and while i
was there
i built tools and deployed just cell
sites all over the state all over the
midwest got to travel all over the world
basically bringing up telecommunications
services
spent a lot of time working on routers
and switches working in data centers
flying overseas setting up cloud
services i set up verizon's first cloud
platform so i did a lot of work while i
was at verizon
however
i'm sure everyone's aware the
telecommunication industry isn't exactly
known to be you know innovative you
usually treat it as a local kind of
oligopoly or local monopoly for the most
part um you've got kind of your bigger
players and you're smaller players that
are out there most of the big players
especially wireless telecon we're going
to be verizon 18 t-mobile
and then you've got your smaller players
such as u.s sailor which we have here
locally as well
so i'm active
extremely active in these projects not
only just as an enthusiast but also as
an investor a mentor advisor
so i am a volunteer with the dui license
dui alliance which is
a non-profit group that is set up to
basically provide expertise from people
who have a background in telecom for
these new projects and pitches that are
coming up so actually this is open on
github anyone can request one of these
projects if you have an idea
especially there's a shortage in all
these projects of having enough
programmers
but if you have an idea like why doesn't
your project do this or i want to create
this new sensor
or i want to use this wireless network
in kind of a new novel way
they'll actually give you a bunch of
tokens and it's not it's not a small
amount they'll give you 40 50
in some cases you know over 200 grand
of course it's going to be in their
token uh to go and pursue these projects
and the dui why it's kind of a
non-profit board that goes through those
ideas and say which ones we should
go ahead and find which ones need more
work or shouldn't be hungry
been volunteering with forum here in
milwaukee for many years
i frequently speak at college campuses
such as libya whitewater uw oshkosh uw
madison
we're lucky here to have quite a few
students from those schools here
actually volunteering over at blockchain
village yesterday and today
i also work with
startups i really focus on local
startups here in the uh here in
wisconsin
with that
there aren't
there aren't a lot of people
who worked in telecom and kind of got
out
i appear to be one of the few
so i've been trying to share knowledge
with the community
as much as i could
so i've been on multiple podcasts i've
done multiple interviews trying to
explain to you know quote normies how
does telecommunications work
what is realistic what should we be
focusing on in order to kind of grow
these projects and actually turn them
into something that's real not just
a bunch of people
buying these
uh wireless telecommunication uh quote
minors
and jumping in to make a quick buck how
are we going to make this survive for
the next five 10 15 20 years and
actually hit our profits goals um and
turn this out of just you know yet
another crypto project everyone's just
in for the money
uh so
um the reason why i've been really
excited about this type of technology is
really in my opinion
wireless communication
still today is is somewhat poor meaning
that it's extremely expensive
in my opinion
we should be able to bring the cost down
wireless communication um in addition um
even today um people have coverage
problems um how can we still have
coverage problems we're now on the fifth
generation that's wireless technology we
still haven't figured out how to get
coverage everywhere um everywhere not
only the country but in the world and to
me that that you know
this shouldn't be this hard after since
we've been doing this since the 80s
so the i'll talk a little bit more about
this but the real goal of these projects
are to bring down so that you can get
wireless service for a variety of
providers at very low cost that you pick
you may even have multiple providers
at extremely low cost by extremely low i
mean maybe 20 25 bucks a month
maybe less which is considerably lower
than more costs today
so
i grabbed some stats here from accenture
they kind of swagged that and were the
numbers so
the worst telecommunication industry is
a humongous industry we've got millions
of people working in the industry
there's you know tremendous impact on
the economy
and as well as the revenue that they
bring in so it's an extremely
extremely old industry
that i i think just doesn't isn't
innovating fast enough to keep up
so as i mentioned earlier the cost here
in my opinion could be a lot lower
the average cost here you know i i
pulled up one study here is about 113.
uh but it's very common for people to
play pay in my opinion around 100 a
month for an average unlimited plan with
the
major carriers verizon or 18t uh
t-mobile which will keep somewhat more
affordable
and we've seen actually you know some
other projects try to take this on so
famously we saw google with the loon
project say we're going to put up hot
air balloons and those air balloons are
going to provide wireless service and
kind of beam that around and that
project ended up not going anywhere
and being discontinued
the latest one that's gotten a lot of
attention of course is starlink
so outside of having some latency issues
it's ubiquitous it does provide a lot of
i think more competition to kind of
bring down some of these prices and get
more available in major talents and
cities to where you've got a bigger
spectrum or a t
or another incoming provider and that's
it
you've got more choice out there creates
more competition brings the price down
so
we've been very very lucky here in the
united states mostly because of the fcc
i still today don't quite understand how
we got so lucky we have one of the you
know really the best
uh wireless spectrum rules in the entire
world and i don't know quite how it
happened it's still amazing to me the
really two key innovations that happened
with the fcc is they deregulated a lot
of
formally used formerly military spectrum
so cbrs
so it stands for citizens banned radio
service
so basically what they've done similar
to what you use with wi-fi and 2.4
gigahertz and five gigahertz they said
we're going to create a
spectrum that you can use
for broadband communications and anyone
can use it you don't have to buy it you
don't have to pay like a you know
typically the carriers are paying
billions for these for the spectrum for
the entire country anyone can use it
there is a
licensing process for people who certify
these installs
when you get into cellular
communications there are some barriers
up there
however
many of the projects have put together
kind of remote services to make it so
easy for anyone who doesn't really
understand all this to still have this
done in their home or business
um the second part of it is um what they
call old tart rules
and it's not a bad thing
basically those rules
override um
your local hoa even your state law to
allow you to put up uh broadband
communication networks so you can
override it and this has been referring
to court multiple times um saying that
you know if you want to put a giant
intent on your roof now there are of
course fcc regulations for safety and
height limitations but as long as you
follow the rules
you can
keep it up and the hoa can't complain
it's ugly and have forced you to take it
down
and those are very very strong
rules there so
really that those are the two key
innovations that even makes possible if
we didn't have cbrs spectrum these
projects would have been dead they'd
never gotten off the ground three years
ago
and really started to take off two years
ago
and the ability to actually have federal
law from the fcc that's actually strong
has some teeth to it to allow people to
do this is just incredible so those are
really the incentives that came up and
made this possible on a theoretical
level
from this um the the largest network
that i'm going to talk about is helium
what they did is they they saw these
rule changes and said you know we should
take advantage of this why don't we
start building a communications network
that's built on a blockchain
to where anyone can put up broadband
service
um in the world although it's more
popular in my opinion the united states
mostly because we have friendlier
spectrum rules and we actually share
what you make
with whoever sets it up so when you put
up one of these
hot spots sell sites micro sales you
call them different things but they all
provide wireless service
you actually get paid in real time when
uh when those are operating service
now even when you do that no one's going
to do it you know off the bat because
great i bought this usually expensive
miner
and it's not going to pay very much
if no one uses it so
they've really innovated with
in that space to influence people to do
it by creating a new
a new approach that called proof of
coverage so these miners when they go up
and start producing wireless service
they actually talk to each other
one
sends out basically kind of a hello
packet everybody there you're like can
you hear me this is my unique global id
and then the ones around it listen they
hear it and then they say yes i hear you
and then the network protocol says great
um you're actually there you're not
lying by your location within
you know maybe 100 meters and
we're going to reward you for that so
you can get paid even if you're not
actually taking on any traffic now
that's
uh very exciting and makes it easier to
deploy and pay people early on the flip
side it somewhat defeats the purpose of
it which was to actually get traffic on
it but no one's going to jump on one of
these networks if they don't exist so
that's how they fix the problem of
actually getting people to say okay the
roi on this is this if i do this install
this location
this makes monetary sense there's other
there's plenty of people who do it don't
care about the money as well
but the very large
um what i would call multi-service
operators um and i'm i'm one of them as
well um you know go in there and say i
want to grow the network as well but
most people don't understand this
technology um maybe as soon as you
mention it's blockchain or crypto have
no
interest in it
at all due to its bad reputation so
we make it simple
we'll basically manage it for people
and then just pay them every month and
help them have a good install that we
have some confidence will make a certain
amount
now i mentioned other projects here as
well because this first
network the helium network has been so
popular it spawned many copycats out
there
and i mean that in a good way they've
taken it and changed some things about
the protocol
and said we're going to do that as well
but we're going to tweak it a little bit
so
that's kind of the exciting part
pollen is one
project that's taken that on and what
they've done is they said well helium
says we want to do all wireless
communication which by all it really
comes down to lorawan based
communication
cellular communication and wi-fi
communication
so their long-term plan is to say
you can have one of these you know what
they call miner that provides all three
of those viral services from your house
or from your business uh from your
rental uh rental unit and people can use
all three and you will get rewarded for
them
pollen has said that's too complicated
we don't believe in wi-fi i don't
believe in lorawan we're just going to
do cellular so they're only deploying a
4g cellular network
now there are many more other projects
out there i mentioned level 5 which
slows it quickly
off the ground
and there's you know half a dozen more
right behind him
so
uh go into more detail here this is
probably the first time you've ever
heard of the cbr spectrum um
and it's it's fairly recent it wasn't
didn't really come
really into
effect until beginning of 2020
which is you know around when the
pandemic started
so that we've got 150 megahertz which is
not very much in the cellular world
typically you're going to want 200 300
400 500 as much as you can get
and it's in the 3.5 gigahertz band um
that's not a great band for long-range
communications you usually want
something closer to 600 megahertz the
higher you go you get higher bandwidth
but you typically have less ability to
penetrate
buildings trees et cetera
but they they open that up
and now anyone can use it so it's like
being able to just like
it creates the ability so that anyone
can set up cellular surface kind of like
buying a wi-fi router
which is really uh in my opinion really
innovative
um so otard stands for over-the-air
reception devices and what it does
is really protects
anyone who wants to expand broadband
network
this somewhat came in from some feedback
that
a lot of operators were kind of sick of
getting pushbacks from
the city county state
hoas saying oh you know you can't
install this you can't put this up
because it's ugly and they said well in
order for the united states to be
competitive we need as much there we
need infinite broadband
and we need to promote
the rights of people who want to expand
broadband networks
so i think we got really lucky i don't
think we get one thing we got too
in other countries it's not like this at
all there is no
there is no kind of concept of cellular
unlicensed communication
there is no concept of the right to
expand uh cellular networks you have to
buy it you have to work with existing
telecom providers it's a very slow
cumbersome expensive process
so
in my opinion you know these are all
taking different approaches um i do like
helium that's going after everything
that's out there so they're they're
saying we're gonna try everything we're
gonna see what works and give people a
choice so you can um you can use what's
called utility tokens from all this so
when you actually this is their version
of proof of work it's really proof of
wireless service um and actual data
communications and these are all public
uh over in the blockchain village i've
got live screens up you can see where
they all are you can also see what
everybody makes
you can see who uh whose wallet owns
them you don't know who it is we can see
a lot that they have
so it's radically more transparent than
anything i've ever seen in the telecom
industry much more affordable and that's
what's allowed it to grow so quickly
so how does this kind of work if you
want to do it and join one of these
networks so
you have to buy the equipment uh it can
range from a small device
to a very large one like what's pictured
there offering a 4g lte service
powered by a solar panel and a battery
on the top of a mountain or an attic top
of a roof
they're all over the place
and those are the equipment that you
need in order to provide that coverage
um next you got to pick you know you got
to see what projects are out there
that's compatible with that equipment a
lot of them either create the build the
equipment or certified equipment
themselves you have to go through them
otherwise they have a list of approved
manufacturers to where you can just buy
it on board which is really attaching it
to your wallet and then once it's open
in service
you start earning from it
a lot of manufacturers have jumped onto
this and this includes
companies here in wisconsin as well so
so base sales
their north american headquarters is
actually madison and they provide a lot
of the
um 4g lte equipment actually for almost
all these projects so wisconsin is a
part of this innovation as well and it's
actually helping the local economy in
this tremendous demand for this
equipment
so i mentioned proof of coverage and
i want to explain a little bit what does
that mean that's a very new kind of
concept and it's really one out there
saying can you hear me and then at least
one says i hear you that validates you
are
physically
nearing me um you're gonna get a reward
for them
now they they've had a lot of issues
with people trying to gain this so just
because no one hears you you know what
that other one is also next to you or
what if somebody buys 50 of them puts
them on their basement uh yes that's
happening and they're working on
different measures to kind of
through data analysis determine if it
appears to be real appears to be fake
this is an ongoing issue
especially with
uh with a lot of chinese installations
russian installations to where they have
no interest in providing any real
service they just they just want to get
the tokens and be paid
so where are we at right now so
um you know i put a screenshot in here
um of helium uh it's
it's only from a month ago but it's
already quite a bit bigger if you go
back two years it was there was nothing
in wisconsin
and now here we've got thousands of
these um especially in dense metro areas
but they're at appleton they're in green
bay they're in menomonie you know up by
the finger like you know where we touch
the michigan wisconsin border
they're all over the place and there's
actually facebook groups there's one
here in milwaukee it talks about people
doing installations and sharing
equipment giving advice
and what is a good installation you say
we want to buy one
that kind of stuff
so it's really blown up it's also was
featured in a february article in the
new york times about how
maybe we're
actually finding real world services and
a real benefit to crypto besides just um
you know a lot of
dgen projects or decentralized finance
projects
out there that are purely for the money
so i mentioned a new project that just
this just went public
allowing anyone to participate about
three weeks ago
and this is the pollen network so
they're taking a much more focused
approach same idea same proof of
coverage
mechanism that helium has but what
pollen does is they actually just do
cellular communications and
they actually give you ecem so if you
have an iphone 11 or newer or most
android phones from fall of last year to
this year if they support band 48 which
you can look up online they actually
participate in this network and because
you you have multiple sims that
secondary sim is also active as well and
that secondary sim will listen on band
48 the cbrs spectrum and if it
seasonally sell sites you get rewarded
because you
confirmed it's actually in that area
they can actually see it
so
they've taken a slightly different
approach
uh with it um they also use some
different terminology cell sites are
flowers validators with you know people
who who validate the coverage with sim
cards are called bumblebees it's kind of
funny the terminology they use
but they're they're very focused on
cellular communications um
some of the most exciting news is really
the partnerships because these are great
projects on their own but
what's going to make them successful in
the long term is going to be actual
normal people using these whether they
know it or not
so there's been a lot of partnership
announcements recently
so helium network plans to launch their
cellular network this fall and they've
already secured a roaming agreement um
with boost mobile
and a couple other nvme providers so
fairly low bandwidth um they've also got
a couple aminos i've never heard of
for for data only sim cards
also
microsoft has now partnered up with the
healing network so if you build an iot
device you're looking for an
international iot network that
tends to be more affordable
you can do that natively
working with them so you can build an it
device
on their azure iot platform and just
select
helium as well the networks that you use
for wireless communications so it's very
easy it's very quick that's very
affordable and these partnerships that
come up
they also work with flying scooters
i learned this we actually have iot
mouse traps now so when they go off and
say hey i caught a mouse it uses the
helium network
that's crazy so i've tried to talk to
local companies in wisconsin who i think
could take advantage of this
um
for iot style communications for
either household appliances
or for
kind of uh
energy
i want to say independence energy
diversity
who want to have like another network
maybe outside of a cellular network to
communicate on
that may be more affordable but this is
still very new has been wong has been
around that long and most enterprises
are very reluctant
to consider these as viable alternatives
because they're so new which you know i
think makes some sense but
in my opinion if they keep on growing
and the economics makes sense and they
are reliable
um
they are eventually
going to start getting some bigger and
bigger partnerships the balls already
start rolling it's just going to
accelerate over the next couple of years
so
i mentioned here i'm one of those kind
of multi-service operators i simplify
all this i have the equipment on hand
i help install it i buy somewhere to put
it so
for instance here this is what it looks
like when i check it out so
i will do kind of a remote
what they call a remote site survey and
what i do
is i kind of see
how can one node talk to another and
look at that coverage and a lot of this
depends on height
of these units where their antennas are
at
as well as the natural topography of the
land but
the real thing that matters with all
this is how many are there
if there are too many in a small area
they have to share their rewards and
make a lot less and that's designed and
built in like if there's already
coverage there you don't need another
one
so there's kind of sweet spots that you
want to check out and that's where you
get the most reward
and these kind of remote site survey
services that are out there some are
free some are paid allow you to kind of
do this to see
what is the map of the land where
they're going to install it and kind of
give you a fairly reliable estimate of
what you're going to make
so find good locations
uh find the owner whether that's uh
that's a landlord someone with a private
piece of property
somebody has a lot of tall trees
um a business a lot of people are
focusing on indoor as well especially
with
the cellular networks people are
expecting more partnerships to be
announced so they're saying hey your
business can make extra
quote-unquote fairly passive income
because a lot of these are set and
forget it they do remote software
upgrades we do remote troubleshooting
and you get additional income
the only price you have is bandwidth
which you already have an internet
connection or something like that
that's no additional cost and internet
uh depending which miner you buy that
can be four dollars
a year to you know 10 20 bucks a month
depends how much power they're using and
how big of an install they have
but it tends to be a win-win for
everybody
so
because this network is public anyone
can see
roughly where they're at
you can see what all these different
names make and all the names are random
um of all these hotspots you can go to
this explorer site today and see where
all these uh different locations make
and
uh from my experience you know that i
talked about quality of the install what
i really need is height for the install
height of the antenna and using good
quality um kind of antenna lines like uh
lmr 400 is the most popular one because
it has the least amount of loss
to make sure that you good strong
consistent signal
will help you earn the most rewards
i you know
how do these operators make money
well
these numbers are you know with
what's happening this week the numbers
are a little bit lower because uh
crypto's dropped in price but
um basically you try to you know i try
to make it so that the person at least
if it's a residential install they at
least make enough to make a debt in
their internet cost
and then from there we split the
earnings so they make that
and from an operator point of view you
want to pay off the equipment that
you've installed with them
but after that
it's fairly passive there's a variety of
large operators out there
some split 20 some split 50 some split
70 some split 80.
um some if as long as it's online for
two years and they make enough money
they give it to you so that will
actually transfer ownership of it to you
which is extremely generous
and in my opinion
i was like coming from telecom i was
like that's just like mind-blowing
they'd never do that
that ever that they're like why would we
want to
you know give ownership of these assets
to our customer that doesn't make any
sense
it makes sense if you want to grow the
network and you're not purely looking at
it at profit in some cases
so
uh i mentioned in the beginning like
you're really trying to
as a part of one of these projects
trying to bring up the cost of wireless
connectivity everywhere in the world
it's it's the best here in the us due to
regulatory reasons um
but it's really interesting you know
thinking about this from the project's
point of view whether it's helium or
pollen because
then
they basically are getting infinite
bandwidth and in aggregate not at every
site obviously people aren't going to
have um infinite
bandwidth on residential spectrum
but
they are going to be able to have
the ability as a project overall to say
yes you know if you're an iot device we
are confident it's going to be reliable
it's going to be available
um and you're going to have all the
bandwidth that you need
so um and they do built-in have some
built-in redundancy in the protocol so
that let's see the nearest hotspot to
you
doesn't have enough bandwidth so it will
actually forward those packets to its
nearby neighbors and they have more
bandwidth so there is there's some
protocol
kind of redundancy built in
downsides well there's plenty of
downsides
besides it um you know being associated
with blockchain or crypto um you can't
control the quality of the install
people who buy these and this is another
thing going through telecoms it's just
crazy they never allow is they they
don't control where you play you can buy
one of these put in the basement and put
in the first floor by the window you can
put it in the kitchen
those aren't good places to put it but
you can put it there you're not going to
make much
uh
and also if you put it on the roof you
buy a cheap antenna off ebay you do that
as well um you're gonna have problems
you put more noise on the network and
lower the quality of the network the
ability to use it but they don't they
don't control that they try to just
influence that through the rewards
mechanism
they can't tell you oh well you actually
have a cellular
a cellular unit
you better have at least 100 meg of
symmetric internet so up and down
um don't do that either so if you're
using the service and let's say your
cell phone says well i want to download
a big file or stream you know in 4k
might not be able to support that
in gaming something i mentioned a little
bit here and there
gaming is a big issue still with all
these networks people who are studying
the white papers taking apart this
equipment looking at the code are
finding multiple ways to
get these utility tokens
without actually helping the network
grow or improving the quality of the
network so
that's a that's an ongoing issue they
are getting better they are innovating
they are banning
groups and manufacturers
groups of users who are working together
to kind of defeat the purpose of
networking
and i think that's the ongoing thing
they just keep raising the bar
there is no secure network it just gets
better
so
i mentioned the beginning like this is
the part one uh so in my
my opinion this wireless connectivity
kind of revolution is just beginning
this will make it um in my opinion in
the next several years
more affordable i give you more choices
to where you get wireless services from
if they are successful which is a big
big if
but what do you do once you have
affordable ubiquitous communication you
need to use it somehow
you have applications that use it
there are other projects coming up that
are focusing on edge compute and
distributed edge compute to where anyone
can throw up a server and say now we're
competing with
azure cloud with google cloud aws those
projects there's multiple of them
already in the works
those are much smaller much less
well-known but they are coming to say
well if you have fairly infinite
bandwidth we're going to give you
infinite compute
at low prices and anyone can participate
within that as well
and i think that's in the next five to
ten years going to start working this
today they're so early they can't even
think about working together directly in
most cases but that's where i think it's
going
so
thank you for kind of listening to me
talk about this
kind of niche of
real world crypto or real world services
right by crypto networks um i didn't
mention i am i am a an operator
my site is up there uh if you're more
curious about this feel free to email me
or send me a vm on twitter
i'm not trying to grow my network i'm
really trying to spread knowledge of how
they work and why they're doing this for
people who are interested and like i
mentioned earlier we do have communities
here in milwaukee madison throughout the
state of people doing this the most
common thing you see is somebody on a
facebook marketplace going who wants a
free minor
and they split the income
but with that i'm happy to answer any
questions
anything 1899 went over
the cbrs frequency um
what is that range
yeah i think i had to go back to 750.
right there
35 fifty two three seven
yes
what's the price of one of these cells
and how much is the electrical cost of
running one yeah so that's a good
question um so for a helium lorawan
miner um the costs have drastically went
down because the token price has crashed
today it's about 350 per unit
the electrical use is about four dollars
a year
right
so that's what the lower wing is uh the
cellular units use considerably more
electricity
that's going to be closer to probably
ten dollars to twenty dollars a month
um and those units are dramatically more
expensive so
those are going to range they'll start a
thousand dollars and go up to seven
thousand dollars today
considerably more expensive
also because of the
band they have to use
at best you're going to get like five to
seven miles in range in ideal conditions
i
so
as far as the you know what we're
calling telecom the back hall or the
internet connection a lot of these run
on consumer today um and surprisingly um
spectrum 18 t they know people are doing
this they're doing d-packing inspection
because they're too afraid of losing
customers this is my opinion
they are not banning people from using
this because technically this is
commercial service that people a lot of
people are breaking their agreement on
and using for commercial service
as of today
i have not seen any carrier in the world
cancel people's internet for this but
that is a risk
i'm just asking for between each node if
i have a large space desert and i want
to uh
change that to get internet output can
that be done wirelessly no okay no not
natively they should each have their own
wire uh wired or wireless backhoe
yeah but daisy chaining them there are
some manufacturers working on that
technology
however um as of today none of them have
launched a test net or production
network
yeah
you said the keywords before commercial
service
there's a lot of work changing people
are having to buy equipment
people are earning tokens the project
creators that you're getting some money
users are having to pay for this one way
or another
and it's already on free spectrum why
should this commercial service exist on
free spectrum
the fcc allows it um the idea is that
they want to spur innovation they
actually support the mission of the
spectrum to bring down cost of
commercial service so that's why they're
on board which
is also pretty incredible
it's not like you know okay like the 2.4
or 5 gigahertz band for wi-fi they
actually want to be used commercial um
for this but i mean that's used
commercially as well a lot of wireless
isps use that space
yeah so if i want to consume this
service just as an individual
is there like
a company i can roll up to be like
here's your sim card you can now
go on the helium network yes um so
actually the hidden network has a
dedicated space they have recommended
hardware builds kits manufacturers and
code examples you can have this up and
running in an hour
but i mean like literally for like my
own
my laptop like i want to use the network
to do what i want to do got so um
you want to use a sim card for for data
access right yeah
today you can't do that
pollen is the only one that has
production
cellular service and today they only
have e-sims you have to have e-sim
compatible hardware um
they're
helium is launching with physical sims
they're fifty dollars each uh this fall
it's where you can use it
as a data only network
right so in telecom um
right you have seamless handover over
mostly the s1 protocol uh between cell
sites um
the the technical what these are
actually
it's kind of funny um each hot each
hotspot microcell in cellular today is
actually a
technically a different network with a
different mobile core so when they do a
handoff they're actually handing off to
a separate network between cells versus
if you're on verizon they're just
handing to the same cell within the same
network so the handovers aren't as clean
and seamless
they do they do work however but they
they tend to be a little slower but yes
you hand over between cells
in the next two years they are planning
to launch a shared cloud core
but that is still pretty far out
so what they're actually using under the
hood is what's called the magma open
source
lte core project
so when they put up one of these nodes
it's not just um the the enormous b so
the cell site and the antenna they also
put the entire mobile core
actually in a computer that attaches
that as well so it's actually an entire
network
but that network um all the billing
information um is integrated directly
with the the main healing protocol
so you get your tokens paid based on
um based on data transfers as well as
other
um other sites are able to see activity
from the course so even though they're
separate cores here's the crazy part
they actually have the same network id
so it's it's very pledging
[Music]
so you mentioned um something in the uh
in a load balancing scenario where one
node has uh low bandwidth and they have
to hand it off to another another itself
how does that
expand on that a little bit yeah that's
on the lorawan
helium network so
it is possible for one to be up and
maybe briefly lost internet
it can actually retransmit that to
nearby cells and say i'm forwarding this
to you
[Music]
a consequence of doing that however is
that you will not earn before that data
transfer since you are brokering yet not
actually allowing it to hand off to the
republican internet's got a potential
range
i think
they've gotten high enough
yeah the one in my attic was 20 miles
so it's got significant range with with
extremely low power
the most i've seen is a kilometer but
that's pretty crazy that's usually
bouncing over the water
and how much power is it
the same thing four dollars a year
oh how am i pulling
how many watts
oh the actual power of the unit um so
they uh those are under uh those maxed
out a lot but they're typically using
less than that that's at full power
so uh laura land right now are almost
universally omni
um for the cellular networks they are
directional
um there are some omni as well but um
those tend to do a traditional telecom
like a three sector or two second design
all right i think that's it
well appreciate everybody coming
hopefully i um
help you learn a little bit more about
what's going on early backyards here in
wisconsin but about some actually real
world services going on uh hopefully
blockchain for good but uh we've got a
long way to go appreciate talking with
everybody today if you want to learn
more or talk to me in person i plan to
be over at blockchain village most of
the day today
and talk about this in more detail but
appreciate your time
okay
so
[Music]
you