Helium Community Call
August 28, 2026
Duration: 23m 50s

[00:00:00] Speaker: I figured that out right after I said something.

[00:00:04] Speaker: All good.

[00:00:09] Host: Whoa, we have rolling water bottles and cameras. I would say let's give it a couple of minutes so more people can trickle in. As you know, there is a community call next week scheduled too, so whoever misses this one, we will continue onto the next.

[00:01:31] Mario Di Dio: Can you guys hear me, or do I sound like I am a million miles away?

[00:01:34] Speaker: We can hear you. You are good.

[00:01:38] Mario Di Dio: Perfect. That is surprising. Why did the Wi-Fi break up with the router? I am waiting here, man. Where is the punchline?

[00:01:49] Speaker: Why?

[00:01:56] Speaker: Because there was no connection.

[00:01:59] Mario Di Dio: Yes. That is awesome. Thank you. Love it.

[00:02:11] Host: People are starting to trickle in. That is good.

[00:02:20] Speaker: Just a quick note: I do have this recording, so we can finish this after the call.

[00:02:29] Mario Di Dio: That is perfect.

[00:02:48] Mario Di Dio: Let's get started, out of respect for the people who connected early and on time. Again, this will be recorded, and we will have next week's community call to dig further if there are more things that need to be addressed.

I do not know how much time we are going to need, but we are here because we want to hear and try to answer, in the most transparent way, any question that you might have.

For those who have not paid much attention this morning, I published a blog post in which we address an upcoming significant change in our carrier roster.

One of the carriers that was part of the Helium program came through an arrangement with a third-party integrator we were using to bring carriers in. That arrangement is ending, and it is ending on Monday.

That does not change any of the other carrier relationships that we have. Things like AT&T, Telefonica/Movistar, and the other MVNOs that are part of the network - none of that is changing. Only this specific engagement will come to an end.

I want to address this in three ways: short term, medium term, and long term.

What does it mean in the short term? Tactically, the Greenfield Hotspots will receive a configuration update that will turn off Passpoint for that carrier. Brownfield partners will be contacted by the sales team to change that configuration. In the backend, we will have what we call a NAS ID denylist that will prevent traffic from flowing back.

It also means that the number of daily active users will take a hit. Right now, we estimate it will be about 30%.

This also creates a lot of pressure on us to act on HIP 150, which is being voted on right now and looks like it is going to pass, and to implement the tiering system and the change in the backstop so we can support our deployers.

That is the most important part for me in the short term: trying to give as much support as possible to the deployer community that is out there closing deals and making it possible for deployments to continue.

Let me talk about how we got here. A couple of weeks ago, I already posted that we were stopping submissions for this carrier. That was part of an ongoing and recent change of stance regarding Wi-Fi and specifically our business model.

It is a combination of competing business models between us and the third-party aggregator carrying that traffic. I cannot name names because, if I do, I would be breaching all sorts of things. The beauty of having a community is that they already know many of the things I do not need to mention directly.

There is definitely a head-on difference in the business model between us and the third-party aggregator. That caused friction with respect to how much they want to see us growing a business model that is pretty much head-on with theirs.

But it is not just that. There is also the carrier behind it. That is why my blog focuses on the carrier. The carrier itself is becoming less trusting of Wi-Fi, specifically Wi-Fi that comes from non-enterprise accounts.

This is different from others like AT&T and Movistar. They have a very different stance when it comes to Wi-Fi, specifically the Wi-Fi we are trying to bring to market, which is quality-first and quality-controlled.

Sometimes, like I mentioned in my post, things take time to be adopted. Sometimes sales organizations within carriers have their own ways of being incentivized toward a specific technology stack. Right now, Wi-Fi is not that in some carriers; it is for others.

I want to be straightforward: this is as much a political move as it is a technology move. That is all I am going to say for now. I do not know if we need to say more at this point.

I want to say that it has nothing to do with the quality of the deployments. From my perspective, our job is to continue showing that our deployments - even Tier 3 Greenfield deployments - can be trusted.

Anybody who has enterprise-relationship experience knows that technology is only part of the story many times.

To be quite open about the medium term, I do not see how this can change anytime soon. It can change in a couple of months. It can change later. I do not want to give any false expectations.

All I know is that, long term, I feel every carrier on the planet will use Wi-Fi on par with its cellular stack because they have no choice.

I read this morning that Vodafone Spain returned 3.5 GHz spectrum to the regulator because they did not want to incur the cost of deploying it. There is also a cost to holding it, so they returned it. I have never seen a carrier return spectrum to the regulator before.

Those are small signs of a long change in the industry that will occur undeniably.

In the medium term, we might see this come back in a different form. Our job as Nova is to continue pushing everybody in the industry to adopt the model.

There will be more coming from the team next week. It has already been in the works for a while. There is serious validation happening in the field that we will be able to broadcast to the world next week.

Long term, honestly, nothing has changed. I do not think this changes the long-term thesis for Helium, Wi-Fi, convergence, or all the things we have said. I continue to believe in it. That is the way the team will push forward.

[00:11:04] Community question: Could they be added back? Under what circumstances?

[00:11:11] Mario Di Dio: I do not know what the circumstances are. It might be conditions on the type of deployments. It might be a different type of engagement style that is much more focused on specific venues to start with, for example.

At the moment, I do not think I can provide more than what I just shared. All I wanted to say is that the channels are still very much open for that to happen.

[00:11:46] Joey Padden: One additional comment is that we are going to email Brownfield deployers with the changes needed to remove this carrier.

It is going to be blocked at the AAA layer, but we are still going to ask deployers to remove it from the controller configuration because it can cause a user-experience issue.

We always want to ensure that we are not responsible for user-experience issues, because that hurts the future prospect of getting a direct connection with this operator. We have to show that, as a community, we provide good-quality service that does not hurt user experience.

[00:13:14] Mario Di Dio: Thank you, Joey. There are places where our technology is making an impact on connectivity for people.

If disconnecting that carrier causes an actual user-experience issue - for example, there was terrible coverage for that carrier at that place, and now there is no longer good coverage because we were asked to disconnect - I encourage you to email the team at business@helium.com. You can also send it directly to me at mario@helium.com.

We are trying to understand, from the field and from the bottom up, the impact on the experience of affected subscribers, and to measure it. That can help those conversations as well.

[00:14:20] Community question: Are we close to talks with Verizon?

[00:14:26] Mario Di Dio: Verizon has just started to play with Wi-Fi offload in specific verticals, and they are taking a very careful approach to deployments.

If and when we get into that situation, I expect it to be even slower than some of the conversations with the carrier we discussed today. They are even more selective at the moment.

Again, that does not change anything long term. It is just that, in the short and medium term, we need to go through this, and we can go through it together.

HIP 150 changes a lot about deployer economics. I understand, of course, that 30% less traffic has an impact, and there is no reason to dance around the subject.

The commitment this community has shown throughout the years has been incredible. Personally, I am fortunate and grateful for all the work the community is doing in the field to make it happen. My commitment has not changed at all when it comes to what I think carriers will need to do in the future.

We might see a different way. As I said, it might be vertical-specific. It might be a different type of go-to-market approach to jump-start some of those carrier relationships again.

Nonetheless, this is the current status. Next week, be on the lookout. I think some of the products we will announce are very interesting, and they are already creating a lot of interest in the telecom market.

Hopefully, you will understand more of what I am saying once that becomes public knowledge. We have a very good pipeline of customers for those product lines that will help accelerate the network-offload thesis.

[00:17:06] Marc Nijdam: A HIP 150 update: it looks like it is on track to pass. I think the vote ends at about 6:00 p.m. UTC on Monday. We are ready to deploy both the blockchain and oracle updates.

We are finalizing testing on the oracle side, but it seems to be following the HIP pretty precisely.

[00:17:38] Mario Di Dio: Thank you, Marc. That is very important. There was a good point this morning about trying to avoid a lag between HIP passage, which looks likely, and implementation.

Just to be clear, the HIP passing does not mean people automatically start receiving reward multipliers. That still requires negotiation between the deployer, the business-development team, and the carrier. That is not instant.

The HIP will deploy, so at least the baseline will rise to eight cents per gigabyte.

[00:18:16] Community question: Is there more information on the Helium Plus process for our locations and the processing time? We were ready to submit yesterday.

[00:18:31] Mario Di Dio: I think this is referring to once the HIP passes. I am not sure if the question is about the speed of approval, the approval process, or going through the Helium Plus portal. The latter is in the works, and we will have that shortly.

The actual submission to carriers, I believe, is back on track.

[00:19:06] Helium team member: We give carriers a list weekly. In July and August, carrier-side personnel were on vacation, and there was turnover among the people processing that list. A couple of weekly lists took more than a week.

The new people are ramped up on the approval flow, and we should be back to about one week from submission to approval.

[00:20:27] Helium team member: Do not forget the reward-multiplier point. If you are already a Brownfield deployer or Helium Plus partner, there is no need to apply to a different program. You just have to be in the Helium Plus program to be eligible for reward multipliers.

[00:20:47] Mario Di Dio: I do not see any more questions. We will have a community call next Wednesday this time, not Thursday, because I am heading to Las Vegas next week. There is a conference on real estate, venues, and connectivity that fits us really well. We will take that call from there.

One thing I want to reiterate is that numbers, quality metrics, and all these things have been used by us to support our claims with this specific carrier.

There is nothing like a bottom-up approach. I encourage everybody who knows for a fact that our deployments help the customer experience for this specific carrier to report it, because sometimes the impact is clearer in some places than others.

Let's be honest with ourselves: some deployments are more useful than others. For those where you know for a fact that turning off the integration worsens user experience, send an email to business@helium.com indicating the business locations.

Even better, include direct feedback from venue owners and people who can be quoted in our conversations with the carrier. We are as disappointed as you are. We also think they are wrong, and I think they will see the impact of almost a million people disconnecting.

We have to make sure they see and feel that impact directly from the base.

[00:22:43] Mario Di Dio: I think we can close. I will be available in the general channel if you have more questions, and the team and I will be available next week during the community call.

Thank you so much for participating and for your commitment to the project. I hope this is not something that deters anybody from deploying or continuing to deploy.

Growth is nonlinear, as I wrote in the blog post. This is one of those situations. Let's rally together and show even more of our value to the industry. We will continue to onboard more users, more venues, and more carriers.

Enjoy the rest of your day, everybody. I will see you all next Wednesday. Bye.