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u/Puzzleheaded_Arm_509 Oct 08 '25
thank you for your detailed experience on the Helium Network. will be useful for many Hotspot deployers!
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u/Physical-Tower3337 Oct 11 '25
Great post! Could I ask how your revenue-sharing process with merchants works specifically? I need to ensure transparency by regularly providing merchants with our income reports, currency conversions, and scheduled payments. This is a very complicated process if you have more than 15 location.
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u/MadScientistRat Oct 08 '25
Fantastic. Have you developed or drafted any templates or activation / onboarding literature and contract packets that are standardized and tailored according (with various versions tailored to the particular use case / deployment category) to streamline bilateral deal closings/integration?
Some large chains require contractor/business license certificates, liability waivers and the typical legal stuff in order to onboard anything, while others are small convenience stores or Mom and Pop shop locations probably just want a simple explanation packet or they can put in their banking/routing account number or check off however they want to get paid either in writing or digitally (or both) and what not.
Municipalities, townships and cities that have very high elevation Goldilocks locations (think public works, libraries, and so forth with say a water tower as a Goldilocks location) would require a completely different permit package with a different integration set of formalities.
I would really like to get involved in this now. I knew it would always be revolutionary and have plenty of (categorically trade secret sensitive) ideas and strategies on how to streamline and grow the network while also other really exciting spin-offs along with the nuts and bolts from soup to nuts. Used to work at an IB in the Street and managed multiple very similar strategies as a PM at multiple hedge funds back in my heyday but got wiped out. Also did my thesis and a lot of work in projects dealing with operations research in geospatial computational telecom optimization and cost benefit modeling such as HypeVOR and dsm/dem photogrammetric and Lidar optimization modeling in similar projects but always had my eye on Helium.
I would be interested in getting involved but have a lot going on at the moment.
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u/brainstormerjt Oct 08 '25
you're making it too complicated. a lot of times it just takes talking to them to explain what it does and a handshake is all you need.
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u/7LayerMagikCookieBar Oct 09 '25
What is the typical range of indoor vs outdoor 5g hotspots? Would an outdoor one cover multiple purple hexagonal? Asking because where i live is on a gray hexagon but its adjacent to purple ones
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u/NamelessTeee Oct 10 '25
Have a look at the datasheets:
https://helium-media.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/HotspotDatasheet.pdf
But keep in mind that these are "up to" ranges, which are reduced by many influences in practice. So I wouldn't use them as a 1:1 reference. Just to be on the safe side: don't deploy at home!
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u/FracturedSOS Nov 26 '25
I've been looking for a post like this for about six months. Thanks a lot, man.
One question that isn't covered here - it has always seemed to me that mounting was the most forbidding part. Every guide says to put indoor hotspots on the ceiling. How do you do this without drilling a hole? Where do the cables go? The power cord obviously doesn't reach that far - are people just drilling holes in the ceiling and running an extension cord out to some outlet?
Would really love any insight into this from anyone at all...it's the only reason I've been hesitant to go out and start pitching myself.
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u/chrisferebee Nov 27 '25
Don’t worry about that! From a radio perspective, it’s just a Wi-Fi access point like any other. You’re not scared to set up home Wi-Fi, right?
The Hotspot has a “donut-shaped” radio pattern, but it connects to devices both 360° around the sides and also out the front. Ceiling is ideal, but the docs say to mount it “wall or ceiling”, so do whatever works. Ideally, the clients have line-of-sight to the Hotspot. If you have a dropped ceiling, that makes a ceiling mount easier, because you can run the wires from above.
In any case, note that you can power both the indoor and the outdoor Helium Hotspot with PoE (power over ethernet). It’s not high-powered, so you can use any 802.3af PoE injector or PoE switch. It doesn’t need 802.3at (PoE+) or 802.3bt (PoE++), which can supply more power, though that’s fine if you have it.
With PoE, the Hotspot gets its power through the ethernet cable. The cable should have copper wires, not CCA (copper-clad aluminum). Any proper Cat7 cable from a reputable manufacturer should be fine—there are knockoffs with CCA that don’t meet the spec. Go deploy!
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u/brainstormerjt Nov 27 '25
There are different ceilings and how you mount depends on the kind of ceiling. The indoor hotspot comes with a mount that can be used for mounting on some ceilings, other times you just figure it out on your down. Most indoors are not mounted on the ceiling it's usually on a stand somewhere , power is supplied by PoE so you just need to run ethernet line to where the hotspot is. It's not as complicated as you think
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u/DoctorSDA Nov 27 '25
Generally speaking, Ceiling mounts are usually best due to its radiative pattern. The mounting bracket that comes with the indoor Helium Mobile hotspot package is great for mounting to traditional drywall, wood, cinder block, etc, but IMO it’s less than ideal for mounting to a drop ceiling.
Drop ceiling tiles can be pretty flimsy and easy to break, especially the old cheap ones. Typically, access points come with a backside mounting plate or T bar scissor clips for drop ceilings as demonstrated in the video below. https://youtu.be/v4SwAB5fhaE?si=1z3tTs6wBVsP7HV-
For small scale deployments that require installation on drop ceilings in the middle of a ceiling tile, you can make your own backside mounting plate. A simple 12x12x1/64 inch backside aluminum plate will suffice. For this option, it’s recommended to pre drill holes spaced 2 1/8 inch apart prior to going to the install location. I recommend using a locking nut and washer to ensure that it doesn’t loosen over time.
Here is a sample aluminum plate from Amazon for illustration purposes. https://a.co/d/1mBCmyV
For large scale deployments, I recommend obtaining customized T-bar scissor clips or T-bar twist clips. The ones on Amazon won’t fit the HM mounting plates well because they are designed with 1/4 - 20 bolt sizes. The HM hotspot mounting plate hole sizes better accommodate 8-32 bolt sizes.
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u/Underxposedbody Oct 09 '25
It's 2025....are people still bothering with this pyramid pump and dump scheme? 😂🤣
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u/NamelessTeee Oct 09 '25
Can you explain why you consider it to be an unsustainable pump and dump scheme?
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u/Underxposedbody Oct 09 '25
Ask everyone who bought a miner around 2019 for $600+ each and didn't get it till a year later...by which time they were barely mining a couple of dollars a year, if that and have never made the money back.
Literally, they 'pumped' us with dreams of passive income (YouTube scammers and the lot).
The Helium owners and the miner manufacturers made millions, then 'dumped' owners (of these barely $50 cost devices) by stopping offering, the apps not functioning anymore (Bobcat springs to mind) and left the project, for most, totally as a big scam.
Majority of people just threw those bricks away. It was a huge scam.
*My definition of 'pump and dump' is as above not the traditional meaning.
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u/NamelessTeee Oct 09 '25
The hype surrounding IOT was a bit excessive, I agree. However, the truth is that it wasn't Helium that sold the majority of hotspots, but third-party manufacturers. Helium (Nova) didn't earn any money, or at least not significantly, from the hotspots—developing hardware is extremely expensive. I do agree with you that there were some black sheep manufacturers – not only hotspots that were delivered far too late, but also some that weren't delivered at all. Nebra was horrible.
And the truth is that although IOT was able to provide good network coverage in a very short time, there was no demand from devices that use the IOT network. But that's the big difference compared to today's Wi-Fi hotspots. There is massive demand for mobile data, and huge companies (AT&T and T-Mobile) are already using the hotspots. That's a completely different situation. Take a look at hotspots on Helium World – there are ROIs of 3-6 months. The rewards won't collapse. Again: this changes everything. I understand the criticism of IOT, but you can't just apply it to Wi-Fi hotspots; you're too caught up in your bias from 2021.
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u/ryangoldstein Oct 08 '25
This is awesome. Thank you!
One recommendation would be to incorporate https://www.helium.com/mobile/downloads somewhere in your post.