Nirvana Tech Doesn’t Sell Helium. They Sell Better Coverage.

Nirvana Tech’s first customer was a diner: the CEO was eating lunch with his family when the owner stopped by his table. He pointed out to the owner that the food was great, but the cell service was nonexistent. 

The owner knew. The restaurant was in an old cinder-block building, which was excellent at being a building and considerably less useful at letting a cellular signal through.

The future founder of Nirvana Tech had an idea, and installed Helium-powered equipment behind the register. More than two years later, it’s still there.

“It fixed their problem,” he said.

Not exactly the beginning of a telecom empire. But it gave him and Nirvana Tech’s other co-founder and CTO a useful insight: there were a lot of buildings out there with bad indoor coverage and very few realistic ways to fix it.

Solving Indoor Connectivity for Business that Can’t 

You’ve heard us say it before, and we’ll say it again: Indoor connectivity is telco’s most persistent problem that no one wants to solve. 

A distributed antenna system runs $500,000 to $1 million or more per building, and involves major construction. Ceilings open up, cable gets pulled, and the work takes months.

The onerous task of bringing indoor connectivity to these buildings that were never designed for it usually falls on the businesses operating inside of them. Nirvana works with businesses like senior living communities and hospitals— businesses that work with sensitive populations and cannot split their focus between day-to-day operations and troubleshooting connectivity that should just work. 

These businesses would be set back by the drilling, dust, and a crew working the corridors for weeks or months at a time. More often than not, they are forced to learn to live with spotty, poor connectivity. 

The Subscription Model

Rather than selling a deployment into the Helium Network, Nirvana sells a subscription.

Nirvana Connect provides fully-managed indoor connectivity for a monthly fee. They handle the RF survey, the circuits, the equipment, the installation, the firmware updates, the replacements when something fails, and the monitoring after everyone has gone home. Its NirvanaIQ platform gives the customer a single view of coverage and support activity across every location they own. If a site degrades at 2 a.m., that is Nirvana's problem, not the facility director's.

Customers don’t necessarily need to buy new hardware. Nirvana can layer over infrastructure already in place, or manage the equipment and connectivity needed to support it. Customers do not need to understand how the offload works or care where the coverage comes from. They buy coverage, and they get an invoice in dollars. 

That means they are not entering a revenue share agreement that asks a venue operator to become a participant in someone else's network economics. For venue operators who just want their internet to work so that they can get back to work, it’s a life saver. A monthly service fee is a line item they already know how to approve. By layering coverage over existing wireless infrastructure rather than building a DAS from scratch, Nirvana puts the cost at roughly 90% below a comparable DAS build.

The coverage is enabled by the wireless network the building already paid for. No new cabling, no construction, and multiple carriers supported, so residents, staff, families, and vendors all benefit without anyone changing a phone or a plan.

How The Network Proved It's Value

Commonwealth Senior Living operates 35 communities. Nirvana Connect is live at 33 of them.

The deployment went the way good deployments go: successfully and with no disruption. Residents stopped dropping calls, staff stayed connected moving through the buildings, and vendors could work unimpeded. Quickly, reliable indoor coverage was no longer a missing feature. It was just there, keeping things running.

When a hardware refresh took the largest community offline, the complaints arrived immediately, from every direction at once.

When Nirvana Connect went down during the hardware refresh, we heard about it immediately, from residents, from staff, from every direction,” said Ralf Mann, Commonwealth's Director of IT. “That's when we realized how well it had been running in the background all along. Coverage had become part of what everyone expected the building to deliver”"

Nirvana turned that incident into its own customer story. The outage was the strongest use case they had.

“It's hard for customers to quantify the solution until it stops working,” the Nirvana Tech CEO said.

What’s Next for Nirvana

Nirvana is moving into food distribution, where heavy warehouse construction materials also block cellular signals, and where a workforce running handhelds and scanners cannot afford dead zones. Larger venues are on the list too.

It’s a different industry, but the proposition is the same. Nirvana doesn’t ask its customers to become telecom operators. It gives them a solution to a problem they couldn’t solve on their own, at a reasonable price.

Which, for a service that started with a little piece of equipment behind a diner register, is a pretty good business to have found.

To learn more about using Helium to solve persistent indoor connectivity problems, reach out to business@helium.com.