I've always thought blockchain subsidized mesh networks were a great idea - people provide access via a router, and are reimbursed based on how many other people access the network via their node. Seems ideal, and could quickly and easily scale across an urban area.
Is there some inherent limitation in the underlying technology that prevents this type of distributed system?
First, RF bandwidth is a shared resource. One may credibly complain about the FCC’s allocation of bandwidth, but the big cellular networks work well because they are centrally managed. If every tall building had ten antennas operated by competing token miners, then they would probably have incentives to deliberate interfere with each other, and they would have little incentive to cooperate. The overall results would be much worse than what we have today.
2. Decentralized blockchains are inefficient. Helium would work every bit as well as it does today (hah) if the payments were centrally managed. Of course, it would be more to regulators and law enforcement, which might be a good thing.
ISPs famously overprovision users. While your ISP plan may nominally guarantee some level of bandwidth, the network physically can't support all users using that much bandwidth at the same time.
It's like gyms where if everyone who had a membership actually showed up, there wouldn't be enough gear to go around. The gym's business model completely relies on the fact that most members don't use the maximum of what their plan allows.
ISPs don't want you subletting their bandwidth because that makes it easier to consume all of what your plan allows. They absolutely can't handle a signficant fraction of their users doing that.
So, if a subsidized mesh network were to ever become popular enough to be a viable business, ISPs would simply forbid users from participating in it.
It's just a fundamentally broken business model. It would be like sharing a gym membership across multiple people. Makes perfect sense for the member. "Hey, I only go one day a week anyway, so I can let 6 other people share it on the other days!" But the gym itself straight up could not sustain that at their current membership prices. Their only options are:
1. Forbid it (which is what they already do, since membership is associated with a specific person).
2. Go out of business.
3. Jack up membership prices until they can sustain all members fully utilizing their membership. But that would drive away members who didn't share memberships and make it so that your fraction of a shared membership is about as expensive as a single one used to be.
Fundamentally, you can't pull infrastructure out of thin air. Pretending you can be reselling it won't work.
Here's maybe another way to think about it: What possible viable business model is there for consumer ISP customers to build an ad hoc wireless network on top of the ISP's infrastructure that wouldn't immediately get killed by ISPs entirely reasonably cutting out the middle man?
I could see there being value to a fully independent "intranet" local to a geographic region.
Or more realistically you could introduce plans with data caps, or “burst modes”.
I think there are a lot of knobs here.
But I don't see anything wrong with the underlying technology and the subsidy model. The only hiccup is the expected legal fight from big telco!
And yet, the theoretical (not even real-world) bandwidth for LoRa is in the hundreds of bytes per second; perhaps whole _kilobytes_ if you're giving up most of the range and power savings that LoRa offers for traditional IoT.
On the "small devices exchanging small amounts of data" front, LoRa, particularly for large-scale deployments like the ones Helium resells access to, faces a lot of competition from Thread, Matter, and other "home-scale" mesh options. Until Apple or Samsung puts a LoRa radio in their handsets, it's going to be a niche product. (Unlikely because Semtech owns all the patents on LoRa. One of them might _buy_ Semtech, but I imagine they'd shell out $2 per handset approximately _never_.)
The ToS of the ISP you plugged your "web3 router" into prevent you from reselling your bandwidth.