The pier at Redondo Beach, California draws more than 1 million visitors each year. For years, most of them arrived to near-zero cellular coverage, blocked by the high-rise condominiums sitting between the waterfront and the nearest carrier towers. The problem was well-known. The economics of fixing it through traditional means never penciled out.
Helium Network HNT$0.238+2.1% just changed that without deploying a single new tower.
How Carrier Offload Fixed What Carriers Would Not
Talus Communications, a Helium Network deployer, activated coverage at the pier by enabling the Helium Network on the city's existing Wi-Fi infrastructure and turning on carrier offload, a feature major US carriers use to route traffic when their towers are congested or out of reach. No new hardware was required, and the city spent nothing on capital infrastructure.
"The pier has been a connectivity blind spot," said Mike Cook, Redondo Beach IT Director, in the announcement. "We could not justify the cost. No new infrastructure, no impact on our capital budget."
Within three months, more than 2,000 users per day were connecting through the network, with numbers rising as summer foot traffic builds, per Helium. HNT (HNT) rewards flow to the deployer based on data traffic the hotspot carries, aligning the operator's incentives directly with actual usage.
"For years, the Redondo Beach pier was a dead zone," said Mario Di Dio, Helium CEO. "Helium changes that equation."
Steve Rovarino, President of Talus Communications, put it directly: "When you can walk onto a pier and watch your phone connect, that's the power of the Helium Network in action."
The Economic Case Carriers Could Not Make
The Redondo Beach situation illustrates why traditional carrier infrastructure leaves specific locations underserved. Deploying a cell tower requires significant upfront capital, permitting, and ongoing maintenance. Those costs only make sense when projected revenue justifies them, and a seasonal pier, however crowded, rarely clears that bar for a major carrier.
Helium's model inverts the incentive structure. Anyone with access to a location and an internet connection can deploy a hotspot and earn rewards from the data traffic it handles. The deployer owns the asset, captures the revenue, and bears the risk. Helium currently operates roughly 140,000 hotspots across the United States and serves more than 3 million daily connections globally, per Helium.
That scale comes from individuals identifying gaps firsthand. As Helium put it on June 23: "That's what happens when you distribute infrastructure to the people who see the gaps firsthand."
Helium's Solana Foundation
Helium migrated from its own blockchain to Solana in April 2023, making HNT an SPL token. The Helium Mobile subnetwork, which handles cellular coverage deployments like Redondo Beach, issues MOBILE (MOBILE) tokens to hotspot operators. The IoT subnetwork issues IOT (IOT) tokens for device connectivity. Both subnetworks feed into HNT's burn-and-mint design, where data credit purchases burn HNT and link token economics to actual network usage.
The Redondo Beach deployment is a single data point. As proof of what DePIN wireless infrastructure can accomplish in the gaps carriers leave behind, it is a concrete one: a high-traffic public venue, years without a fix, resolved in months by a local operator with no towers and no public funds.
