DAS Series, Part 2 📶 A DAS (distributed antenna system) is the network of antennas that keeps phones working inside large venues. Most were built around 2011, and upgrading one now costs millions. Who covers that bill, the venue or the carriers, is still unsettled. The answer might already be in the ceiling. helium.com/blog/das-networks… Missed Part 1? helium.com/blog/full-bars-no…

Every QoS panel this year: “Here’s what this could look like.” Helium: here’s what it looks like. Wifi quality of service (QoS) is the hottest topic in telecom right now. Every conference, every working group, every panel is asking the same question: how do you offload phones onto wifi without making the experience worse? Because that’s the real problem. Carriers want to move more traffic to wifi. It’s cheaper, it’s already deployed, and it’s everywhere. But nobody wants their customers stuck on a bad connection that looks fine on paper. Most of the industry is still in research mode. Helium already turned it into a product. Before a phone ever commits to a network, Helium checks the connection quality in real time. Good wifi? It connects. Weak wifi? It gets skipped. It’s live. 1.5M+ people ride on Helium every day, and most of them never notice. That’s the point. The question isn’t whether QoS becomes the standard for offload. It’s who’s already running it at scale.

The largest retailer-owned grocery co-op in the US just turned its store Wi-Fi into a revenue stream. Wakefern is a $20.7B business with 48 member companies and ~365 supermarkets across nine states. ShopRite, Price Rite, The Fresh Grocer, Fairway Market, Gourmet Garage. The first stores are now live on the Helium Network, with more to follow. Supermarkets are brutal for cell signal. Concrete, steel racking, rows of freezers. The traditional fix is a DAS, and the math rarely works for a grocery store. So Wakefern is using what it already owns. Shoppers’ phones hop onto store Wi-Fi automatically. No app, no sign-in. The stores earn as carrier traffic moves over. helium.com/blog/wakefern-gro…

Stadiums are where phone signals go to die. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of phones, in one bowl, for four hours. Macro cell towers can’t even keep up. Bryant-Denny stadium at University of Alabama is the newest Tier 1 venue to route carrier traffic over the Helium Network instead. And more big venues are figuring this out one Saturday at a time. Read more: helium.com/blog/the-handoff-…

Starlink just teased a community program where people host infrastructure and earn from use. We've been running that model since 2019. What six years taught us: the radio is the easy part. What makes a people-built network actually work is everything that comes after it. Automatic authentication. Verified quality. The carrier tools that let Hotspot deployers earn from traffic that's already moving through their neighborhoods. Helium built the largest people-built wireless network. Then we built the software layer that makes networks like it more usable and more valuable to carriers, devices, and the people who host them. More siloed networks isn't the answer. The answer is interoperability. Any device finding the best access point for the job, automatically, without friction. The model is proven. The infrastructure is live. Now we're bringing the tools to the rest of the industry. finance.yahoo.com/technology… #Helium #WirelessInfrastructure