As announced, Helium is switching to Light Hotspots to increase the stability of the network. With a software update applied to your hotspots, they will stop following the blockchain and the performing Challenge PoC activity.
No "Challenged" activity gap
The first change of the Helium team will be moving
the challenging activity to the validator from the hotspots.
Our PoC activity based gap reporting will be changed to remove "Challenged" and add "Data" to that slot instead.
"Sync Gap" information will be removed
Once the Helium is confident with the progress, they will disable hotspots following
the blockchain. With this change, there is no syncing or sync gap for the hotspots.
Once hotspots stop following the blockchain, HeliumGeek will stop showing Sync Gap.
No more "relayed" or "synchronizing" state
Light Hotspots do not communicate to each over the
peer-to-peer network, so these states will no longer exist
"Port Access" information will be removed
With the removal of peer-to-peer network from the hotspots,
there will not be a need for static IP or port mapping. As this means that you will not need to worry about port
44158
of your miner, we'll be removing ping capability from the app.
Simplified subscription plans
"Monitoring" and "Reward Alert" subscriptions are merged into a single subscription plan. You will pay once and
get both services.
You still will be able to configure services separately for the same hotspot.
If you already have an active subscription for both of the services, we're increasing your license to activate the service on more hotspots. Someone having 1-hotspot "monitoring" and 1-hotspot "reward alert" subscription, will now be able to activate both services on two separate hotspots.
Reachability Alerts will disappear gradually
Not initially, but over the time, peer-to-peer network support will be removed from all of the hotspots by the
Helium Team.
As the Light Hotspots do not communicate to each over the peer-to-peer network, our "monitoring" service will stop
pinging your miner for reachability.
We will continue alerting you for large activity-gaps and offline state. The health of the miner will be verified by
it having PoC activities, not by Internet connection.
With this change the "Reachability Statistics" screen will also be removed from the application.
Important: Please note that, the Helium Team will not disable hotspots following the blockchain immediately. Till this change, HeliumGeek will continue monitoring miner reachability.