Helium Discloses 23-Hospital Health System Carrying 145 TB of Mobile Data in a Week Over Existing Wi-Fi

A multi-state US health system with 23 hospitals is carrying its patients' and visitors' mobile phone traffic over its own Wi-Fi on the Helium Network HNT$0.473-6.4%, and in the week of September 8 to 14, 2026 those hospital sites moved more than 145 terabytes of data. Helium disclosed the deployment and its figures in a case study published on September 28, 2026, covering 10,654 access points across 28 locations in Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. Neither the health system nor the mobile carriers involved are named.

How hospital Wi-Fi carries carrier traffic on Helium

Carrier offload lets a phone hand its data to a trusted Wi-Fi network instead of a cell tower, without the user doing anything. Helium's conversion documentation describes the mechanism: Passpoint-enabled access points (hardware from Ubiquiti, Cisco, Aruba and others) are configured so that carrier subscribers join automatically, and the hospital's existing Wi-Fi networks keep working as before. Helium's case study adds that the connections use WPA3-Enterprise encryption and support Voice over Wi-Fi, so calls ride the same links.

That matters in hospitals, where signal from outdoor cell towers often fails to reach deep inside large buildings. The traditional fix is a distributed antenna system (DAS), a building-wide network of antennas wired back to each carrier. Helium says its approach cuts infrastructure costs by 60 to 80 percent compared with a multi-carrier DAS overhaul.

Janesville campus became Helium's busiest enterprise Wi-Fi site

The rollout is still in progress. According to Helium, the first location began carrying traffic in late July 2026, the large hospital campuses started coming online in the second week of September, and the remaining locations are activating through the fall. Helium reported that in the September 8 to 14 week the live sites served nearly 12,000 unique carrier subscribers across more than 750,000 sessions.

One campus accounts for more than half of that week's volume. The hospital in Janesville, Wisconsin, came online on September 9 and carried 79 terabytes in a single week, according to Helium, which says the campus became the busiest enterprise Wi-Fi site on the entire Helium Network by data volume within days of going live.

Talus Communications and the Airbridge system

The integrator is Talus Communications, whose Airbridge system converts a facility's enterprise Wi-Fi to carry cellular traffic. In the case study, Talus president Steve Rovarino said clients keep asking for indoor coverage that reaches every corner of a facility without another multi-year capital project, and that integrating Helium lets their existing Wi-Fi investment carry cellular traffic "without requiring a complex construction plan."

Hospitals extend Helium's indoor offload push beyond restaurants and venues

Helium's official account put the pitch plainly when announcing the study on X: in many places a missing signal is an annoyance, but "in a hospital, it cuts people off when connection matters most," it wrote.

The health system joins a pattern we have tracked through 2026, from offload across thousands of US restaurant locations to expansion zones at New York venues including Madison Square Garden and Grand Central. Helium has since packaged that offload tooling for carriers and venue operators in HeliumOS, its carrier-enablement platform. Helium's case study puts the wider network at more than 18,000 active sites serving 1.5 million people a day as of September 2026.

The Helium Network moved its chain to Solana in 2023, and its HNT token and the rewards paid to the people and businesses who host coverage now live on Solana. The hospital case study does not say how the health system is compensated for the carrier traffic its Wi-Fi handles.