Hopefully everyone had a relaxing holiday season. The Helium team accomplished a lot on the engineering, sales and marketing fronts, but as good as 2018 was we’re excited what 2019 will bring when we launch the first decentralized wireless network.

As usual we’re grateful to our community that continues to engage and ask us questions about the project. Shout out to the following Telegram and other community members: viv61, axman, silverfoxy84, xiakoysevilla, Bitcoinchrist, mario_255, yepyepbetbet.

Remember the best way to keep up to date is to sign up for our newsletter and if you want to participate and host a hotspot get on the list.

Without further ado, let’s get to your questions:

Hi team is there a testnet available? Really wanting to be a part of this project.

We are getting close. We have already begun testing devices in the field (think of this as pre-Alpha), and are excited about the results and what we’ve learned so far (see a related post from our Head of Product).

Is this project different from heliumchain.org?

Yes that’s a completely different, unrelated project. We are Helium at helium.com.

Mining via the hotspot: do I need to be in a dense population area to profit from mining? Or can you mine from a rural area?

Your hotspot needs to earn a score to participate in mining and the highest scoring hotspots are chosen. Your hotspot score is optimized if there are other hotspots within range to verify they are providing legitimate wireless coverage via what we call Proof-of-Coverage regardless of the environment: rural or urban.

However, your hotspot can still increase its score by initiating challenges to other hotspots. So even if there are none around you there is some chance that you can participate in mining.

When is the device available for purchase? Any news on the crowd sale?

Please stay tuned as we are focused on preparing and readying our Alpha Testnet. However, if we were to guess we anticipate sales to happen sometime in Q2/Q3.

Where I can download the wallet. I checked the website but couldn’t find anything.

The wallet will be available when our hotspots are available. You can sign up for our waitlist here.

Is Control Console code published? Do we have any spec for that? I guess it will be classical centralized IoT platform?

Not yet. We will have more info early this year as we move towards launch. Head to Helium’s Github for more on the latest from engineering.

Do you guys have a map or anything like that that outlines all the best/acceptable spots to have the device?

We’ll have a coverage map when we share Alpha Testnet information and city launch plans. You’ll also be able to view coverage from the wallet.

How is this protocol better than what FOAM is going for?

Based on our understanding, the goals and technologies of the two projects feel largely unrelated. FOAM is focused on proof of location whereas we’re solving for connectivity and mass deployment of IoT devices. We have no desire to build a replacement for existing maps or a general purpose replacement for location. Also our approaches are significantly different as we’ve built our own blockchain (more about building our own blockchain here), p2p network, hardware, wireless protocol, and a consensus protocol (more here) that rewards the creation of a decentralized wireless network which could ultimately be applied to any type of wireless physical layer. Here’s a post on why we didn’t use LoRa and built our own wireless protocol.