Helium partner with Actility in roaming integration move

Helium and, by consequence, HNT have entered a partnership with Actility to unlock industrial adoption among Fortune 500 companies.

The move aims to deliver roaming for millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices connected on Actility’s ThinkPark Exchange – which is used by industry leaders such as Volvo and Cisco.

The huge partnership brings together the world’s fastest-growing decentralised network of long-range wireless area network (LoRaWAN) devices and Actility’s market leading IoT peering hub technology.

Helium Network is the fastest-growing wireless network, decentralising connectivity and expanding access to the internet worldwide.

Fewer than two years since the Network’s launch, it has achieved global adoption with more than 230,000 Hotspots deployed across 20,000 cities worldwide.

Speaking with Coin Rivet – Alper Yegin – Actility’s Vice President and the Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors for the LoRa Alliance – an international consortium of LoRaWAN internet providers working to roll-out the technology – said Helium’s expansion had been remarkable.

“The growth of the Helium Network has been explosive,” he said.

“By creating a roaming integration with the Helium Network, we are now able to offer any LoRaWAN network, public or private, access to this coverage.

“Enabling them to deploy applications in more markets faster with low cost and less hassle, while also bringing more users to Hotspot owners to maximise their rewards.”

Exclusive: Coin Rivet talks to Frank Mong – COO at Helium

In an effort to find out more about the new partnership Coin Rivet also spoke with Frank Mong (Helium‘s COO).

“Through our roaming integration partnership with Actility, we’re unlocking access to affordable and ubiquitous coverage for millions of IoT devices,” he said.

“Through this integration, Actility will immediately bring our Helium Network coverage to 25 already-connected networks worldwide, spanning large nationwide public LoRaWAN networks, multinational corporate, private networks, and a series of satellite networks.

“As a result, all large-scale enterprise IoT deployments on these networks connected to Actility’s ThingPark Exchange can now roam between Helium-compatible Hotspots and the networks from all the other providers joining the peering platform.”

This represents a substantial adoption, seeing the people’s network connected with leading fortune 500 companies such as Volvo. This likely marks the bridge into mass adoption – and is the consequence of serious work at the LoRa Alliance.

“These include Actility-powered public LoRaWAN networks managed by Orange in France, KPN in the Netherlands, Proximus in Belgium, Swisscom in Switzerland, and many more,” he added.

“This number will only grow from here as new networks join from more than 50 large-scale users of Actility’s ThingPark Wireless IoT platform as well as others using standards-compliant 3rd party network server.

“Overall, this partnership is exciting for us because it is a significant step toward our goal of democratizing access to the internet on a global scale.”

Helium is known as ‘the people’s network’ because the expansion has been carried on the backs of everyday HNT miners, which represent a significant decentralised community working away in the background to facilitate a wireless revolution. Frank was keen to highlight the significance of this new partnership for the community.

“The growth of ‘the people’s network’ is something we’re always excited to see,” he explained.

“As coverage expands and more IoT devices take advantage of the Network, a flywheel effect begins to take shape that provides benefits to public and private organisations, users of IoT devices, and of course, HNT miners as well.”

Coin Rivet was keen to learn more about the future of the project roadmap, and the COO teased clues about the future.

“Helium is building a two-sided ecosystem. On the one side, we’re growing network coverage as fast and as vast as possible,” he said.

“In fact, we’ve added about 60K Hotspots in the past 30 days globally. On the other side, we’re getting devices and applications to use the Helium Network.

Read more: Helium partners with San Jose smart city!

“The City of San Jose has been creative to use the Network not only for smart city applications, but also to fund internet access for low-income residents. Actility roaming on the Helium Network adds millions of IoT devices sending data through people-owned Hotspots, proving the actual utility of our decentralised efforts and HNT.”

But ultimately the executive remained tight-lipped – so watch this space.

“The Helium Network will have several more announcements for you in the coming weeks and months,” he teased.

“We’ll keep you posted on updates as they occur.”

Subscribe to Coin Rivet for market leading coverage of the People’s Network!