Industrial Shifts Aren’t Linear: A Metrics Update
Using Wi-Fi for carrier offload is a paradigm shift. Our metrics will fluctuate while we win it.
By Mario Di Dio, CEO
On Monday, a pilot with a third-party integrator that routes traffic from a US carrier will disconnect, and our daily active user count will drop. I'd rather you hear that from me directly than notice it on a dashboard.
Why? The reality is, "you can't trust Wi-Fi," is a line I’ve heard for over a dozen years in telecom. For some seasoned industry executives, licensed spectrum is the real network and Wi-Fi is the fallback, an afterthought behind small cells and macro towers. If you dig in, you’ll get the same answers that are a decade old: no visibility, no control, no way to guarantee the experience once a subscriber leaves the cellular network.
That skepticism was fair in the past. Until Helium, Wi-Fi offload was effectively a black box. Carriers handed subscribers to access points they couldn't see, couldn't measure, and couldn't manage. Sessions dropped, service suffered, and the carrier took the blame.
Meanwhile, Helium is proving this old perspective wrong every day, giving carriers the visibility, control, and enforceable standards they were told Wi-Fi could never offer. We’ve seen this before in other infrastructure shifts. Twenty years ago, no serious enterprise would run its business on someone else's servers; then the “Cloud” quietly became the default and workloads shifted to the more efficient model. Wi-Fi offload is inevitable for similar cost and efficiency reasons.
To be clear, this news doesn't change any other carrier relationship. What this disconnect reflects is the industry belief I just described. Some decision makers in the telecom world still treat Wi-Fi as second tier no matter what the field data says. The technical achievements and undeniable growth of Helium will be the thing that wins skeptics over in the long run. AT&T, Telefónica, and other carriers in the pipeline already understand this and we’re excited to continue growing those relationships. Wi-Fi closes gaps at the last mile, serves businesses and communities the traditional model can’t, and does it at a fraction of the cost.
Helium delivers cellular-grade discipline applied to Wi-Fi, the precise things whose absence created the mistrust in the first place. It works and carriers across multiple countries are paying to route subscribers through the Helium Network every day.
Paradigm shifts in this industry aren't linear. Some operators will move early and quickly, some will hold to the old view until the data leaves no room for it. Our headline numbers will ebb and flow with each of those decisions. What I watch is whether Helium is working more each quarter and strengthening the case for trusting Wi-Fi. It does. Somewhere in a network planning meeting, someone is still saying Wi-Fi can't be trusted. That sentence will get harder to say, and we’ll prove it to the industry every quarter.
