The Nova Labs, T-Mobile Has Offer Up a ‘Crypto-Carrier’

Nova Labs, the founding team behind the Helium Network, has signed its first five-year mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) deal with T-Mobile to offload the major U.S. carrier’s data onto its fledgling user-deployed Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) small-cell network while allowing its new subscribers to access T-Mobile’s nationwide cellular network.

“I think it’s a huge deal; I think it’s the first of its kind,”

said Amir Haleem, CEO of Nova Labs and one of the startup’s founders, at the Helium House event in New York City in September. “There isn’t another one like it.”

The Helium Mobile MVNO will launch in the first quarter of 2023, allowing potential customers to use T-Mobile’s entire 4G and 5G macro footprint in the U.S. Boris Renski, general manager of mobile wireless at Nova Labs, told VIVAX MEDIA that voice and data plans for the new service would be “available for as little as a $5 a month” and that the company would soon push out unlimited as well as other types of plans.

Nova Labs said that its users have already deployed 4,500 CBRS small cells. Renski noted that customers are adding about 1,700 additional units a month.

Haleem said he would be foolish to try to predict how many CBRS small cells users would deploy over the next six months.

“That’s the magic of it, right? We don’t know,”

he said. “We created the structure of this. After that, it kind of goes on its own. There are different vendors, different manufacturers, and different deployers.”

Customers will be able to use their existing phones to access the new service, Renski noted. New users will even be able to combine their T-Mobile service with the Helium Mobile plan if their phone is a dual-SIM unit.

The first crypto MVNO?

The startup is styling Helium Mobile as “the world’s first crypto-carrier.” Unlike a normal MVNO, Helium Mobile intends to reward its customers with cryptocurrency tokens for using the service. The Mobile token is based on its existing HNT token.

“So if you want to use any data on the mobile network, you need to burn via the HNT token,”

Renski said.

The HNT token will be considered “the treasury token,” Haleem said. He added that the HNT token could be seen as gold sitting in a reserve, with the Mobile token being like a banknote.

Nova Labs sees the mobile and IoT user-deployed networks as simply being the first networks deployed, so the HNT token could possibly serve as the backstop for many more projects over time.

The Helium Mobile network will also accommodate levels of users.

“The people actually building the small cells are going to be the trailblazers who are going to be feeding very important data about the network performance to the mobile blockchain,”

Renski said.

“We’ll be able to use this data to inform [these] folks … about which small cells are useful and which ones are not.”

The users who aren’t building out small cells will still be able to derive crypto rewards on Helium Mobile. Users, Renski said, will have the option to share information about the performance of the macro network and small cells.

“Unlike any other carrier in the U.S, or in the world, for that matter, we are going to be providing service by relying on a combination of networks,” he said. “One network being the T-Mobile macro network … The other network is the Helium 5G network.”

Nova Labs has been working hard with T-Mobile to ensure that Helium Mobile offers “a seamless kind of mobility experience,” he added.

“The type of network that we’re building is commonly referred to as a neutral host network or offload network,”

Renski said.

“It is not designed to completely replace the macro network. No CBRS and small cells will ever be able to replace the need for somebody like a T-Mobile or AT&T.”

He added that Helium CBRS small cells will be used to “densify” the macro network.

Gregg Landskov, senior director of business development at T-Mobile Wholesale, said at the Helium House event that T-Mobile doesn’t have a formal strategy on crypto yet; however, the Wholesale unit will explore that with Helium Mobile.

Nova Labs COO Frank Mong, who was also present at the Helium House, told VIVAX MEDIA back in June 2021 that Helium was talking to a “Tier 1 carrier” about CBRS roaming. This deal now appears to have come to fruition.

But is it 5G?

Analysts have pointed out that the Helium Mobile small cells are not actually 5G. In a response to questions posed by EE Times, Leonard Lee, a contributing analyst at Acceleration Economy, described the units as CBRS LTE.

Haleem agrees that right now, the small cells are 4G LTE. The first 5G New Radio (5G NR) standard small cell will arrive on the Helium Mobile network later this year or next, he said, adding that he didn’t have insight into the manufacturer’s exact plans.

“This is also the same kind of approach that AWS [Amazon Web Services] has taken,”

he asserted.

“These are 5G-enabled networks. That the first pieces of hardware that use the network are LTE is kind of not the point.”

Many might argue that 4G can’t serve as a faux 5G network, no matter what. But by next year, Helium Mobile will start serving up true 5G from its own small cells.

Dish has already signed a deal to use the startup’s CBRS small cells, but the T-Mobile deal is on another level.

“The Dish relationship revolves around them using the network that we are deploying,”

Renski noted. This is different from the wide-ranging MVNO deal with T-Mobile.

All of this builds on Nova Labs/Helium users rolling out IoT hotspots using LoRaWAN technology. The IoT work has seen users deploy nearly a million specialist hotspots in 150 countries.

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