The way to think about the business of IoT – the opportunity of it, newly enabled by blockchain-based, crowd-sourced, low-powered IoT networking – is as a virtuous circle, where infrastructure set down to drive operational savings also creates new enterprise revenues. It is akin to the neutral host model for private cellular networks, where an enterprise builds a 5G network for its own ends, and also leases it for partners to use.
With the Helium model, the primary calculation does not have to be just about how marginal private IoT use cases – environmental sensing in cities, room occupancy in buildings, condition monitoring in warehouses, predictive maintenance in factories – will deliver a return on their IoT infrastructure investment.
