Or more likely, link Helium to the Packet Forwarder that TTI run that can then peer to TTN/TTI. I have the feeling you’d know this if you appeared to be less of a Helium advocate and spent more time using TTN.
However you’ll see this suggested many times on the forum and the prime issue is who is going to provide rewards for Helium traffic.
I think the script-kiddies jumping on the Helium bandwagon to mine for crypto will turn off their gateway and put it in a drawer. Only a few will be bothered to sell. The very best solution for Helium would be to drop the mining BS, just use hard cash and pay a premium for gateways that provide coverage in the gaps - a combination of GPS and uplinks arriving between two or more gateways with unrelated owners on a cascading system would be a start.
In the long run they will end as landfill. 99.9% of people that spend money on Helium gateways were in it for the rewards and these days you spend more on the electricity bill for the gateway than you get out of it. Traffic doesn’t make you any money at all, there are no users anywhere in my coverage areas…
And if you want to deploy (beyond a handful of devices) you need to spend yet more money on console access because they started selling parts of their address pace to get some earnings once the pyramid started to collapse.
If you happen to have a use case running on Helium and you (still) have coverage there is nothing wrong, however make sure to check the coverage didn’t disappear over night… (where I live just 52% of the helium gateways are still online.)
I also noticed that 50% of gateways were down in my area.
Just a quick note that I purchased my Helium gateway for 130€ used. A lot of gateways are being resold. Still in Paris I can find a connection easily for objects. For example, I can track my car in case it is stolen.
I am quite confident that the only solution for Helium is to wide open their networks to traditional APs. This is what gateway-rs is all about.
Do you think it would be possible for an AP to be multi-vendor compatible, i.e. route Helium packets to Helium and TheThingsNetwork to TheThingsNetwork.
I like the wAP R8 because it only consumes 7W maximum as per spec. I will try to use it with Helium.
Do you actually read any other posts or topics or search the forum?
Gateway multi-vendor is an existential impossibility - once someone makes it, it remains made by that vendor. And they are not access points because nothing logs in to them like WiFi.
I am beginning to think that Helium is like trying to privatize part of LoRaWAN and selling it using a blockchain which can only lead to bankruptcy. You cannot sell something which is essentially free and in the case of Helium as long as there are no real end-users, this seems to be a Ponzi scheme. I was not aware that some of the Helium gateways were not actual gateways and they only spoof GPS and receive fake messages.
I will start from scratch reading a good book about LoRaWAN. I will probably end-up setting-up my gateway and application server.