Boris Renski - GM of Wireless at Nova Labs, EP 14

The Zeitgeist

Helium is the first people-powered decentralized wireless network.

In episode 14 of The Zeitgeist, Boris Renski, GM of Wireless at Nova Labs sits down with Brian Friel to discuss how crypto is enabling new ways to deploy wireless infrastructure.

Show Notes:

00:52 - Who is Boris Renski / Background

03:23 - What is Helium?

06:44 - Catalyst behind creating a network

11:20 - People's network built by the people

14:50 - Is Web3 essential to this network?

17:08 - Partnerships

20:20 - How do Saga users benefit from Helium?

24:41 - Building in a bear market / Roadmap

29:05 - Things Boris is excited about

33:30 - A Solana builder Boris admires

Full Transcript:

Brian (00:05):

Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the web through the space forward. I'm Brian Friel, Developer Relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to have with me today, Boris Renski.

(00:20):

Boris is the General Manager of Cellular Wireless at Nova Labs. At Nova, Boris is responsible for leading the charge of all things related to Helium Mobile, the world's first people's carrier. Boris, welcome to the show.

Boris (00:33):

Thank you. Great to be here.

Brian (00:35):

Great to have you here as well. I'm really excited about what you guys are building. For those who were at BreakPoint, you might have seen a little bit about how you guys are going to be powering some of the upcoming Saga phones. But before we get into all that, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you. Who are you, and how did you come to start working at Nova Labs?

Boris (00:52):

Yeah so, this happened fairly recently. I, what the people in the cryptosphere refer to as the normie, not a Degen, so to speak. Most of my career, I spent in open source cloud infrastructure. Prior to my [inaudible 00:01:11] to Web3, I've helped build and co-found a company called Mirantis, which to this day remains one of the bigger players packaging this cloud, open source cloud operating system, so to speak.

(01:29):

My journey towards crypto was the extension of the work that I did in the open source cloud infrastructure, in that when I was still working for Mirantis, one of the open source projects at that time my team was focusing on, was this project called Magma that is can think of it as the open source software that allows anybody to build a cellular network.

(01:58):

And I, about three years ago, left Mirantis with the idea of taking this open source Magma project and creating a very simple way for people to basically take advantage of it such that anybody can just click a few buttons, get a small hardware appliance and have a small cellular network that they can operate.

(02:25):

And the original focus was very much towards the private LT and private 5G space. There was no even thinking of crypto at the origination of this company, FreedomFi that I've started, but then midway for our journey with come across Helium and some of the folks of the Helium team and they've pitched to us to look into this other use case which is a distributed wireless.

(02:52):

And we did a couple of pilots and basically the rest is history, and the whole thing culminated, and Nova acquiring FreedomFi, and my joining the team and now working on Helium Mobile.

Brian (03:05):

That's awesome. Yeah, I definitely think you have a unique path towards coming towards crypto building, very practical open source everyday solutions, and then finding your way into this industry.

(03:17):

For those who maybe aren't familiar with Helium, how would you describe what is Helium and what do they do?

Boris (03:22):

So Helium is a people-powered decentralized wireless network. In a nutshell, it's from the standpoint of a builder. It's a new way to build a wireless network where anybody, be it an individual or a company, can buy a piece of hardware, click a few buttons to enable it, and then this piece of hardware effectively becomes a node on a wireless network. And then the Helium blockchain aggregates all of its individual nodes into a single macro network that is usable effectively by anybody.

(04:04):

And I think that Helium started this with the idea to build a global worldwide network for sensors using this IOT protocol called Laura, but it ultimately has become so successful and was built out so quickly, there's over a million nodes on the network now, that it's almost like it's become a beacon for a new way to deploy wireless infrastructure. Not so much just specifically for Laura, but for almost any use case.

(04:40):

So that drove the community to explore, okay, well we've built out this global worldwide network for sensors, but the model, this bottoms up model of building the wireless coverage is so powerful where else can we apply that model? And that led to this concept of introducing the network of networks of which I think the cellular network for not the sensors, but the phones which Helium Mobile is all about, is the first instantiation.

Brian (05:16):

Yeah, and when you say sensors specifically, what type of sensors are you talking about?

Boris (05:20):

So any sensors that use this protocol called Laura, which is a particular protocol with a couple of aspects to it that make it useful for situations where you would have very low bandwidth and very low power usage. So if you have for example, a sensor to see if there's termites in the ground, you will have that sensor of a battery buried in the ground that'll just live there forever, and it needs access to some global network to transmit something once a day, whether or not there's termites eating something.

(05:57):

So there's basically a huge ecosystem of these types of Laura sensors, and any Laura sensor can work with the Helium network. So I come from a cellular side, so I'm a little bit less in the weeds with the types of lower sensors specifically, but at a high level that's what it is.

Brian (06:19):

That's great. Well then let's jump into the cellular side of things. So, you described this network of networks essentially that Helium now is, and one of the initiatives though as you've pointed out is this Helium Mobile.

(06:31):

You talked a little bit about how "Hey, we have this network that's growing very fast and is very popular and worldwide," but what specifically was the catalyst for starting a mobile network and then what does this mobile network look like today?

Boris (06:44):

Yeah, so let me see if I can give you a little bit of history and that will also share, provide the bigger context. So at FreedomFi prior to my joining Nova, like I said, what we have built is a very straightforward way for anybody to deploy a mini cell tower. You can think of it like a cellular wireless node, which was our technical know-how and the core differentiation for FreedomFi as a company.

(07:17):

And at that time, Helium was already fairly far down their path of creating global coverage for Laura. And when they saw what we did with respect to simplifying the cellular deployments, I got that pinned literally by a buy who was chief product officer at Helium, and he said, "Hey, look at the stuff that we have built with Laura and what you guys have done with the simplification of deploying cellular infrastructure at FreedomFi is amazing. How about we marry these two concepts? We enable people to deploy mini cellular towers or small cells and basically compensate them in crypto depending on whether or not the placement of the small cell is useful or not."

(08:10):

So it was like, "okay, that's very interesting." And we did some pilots, and we did then a bunch of work to actually productize that and we launched that to the general public just some months ago. And obviously the community just took that up and started building all of a sudden. So in the matter of, I think, now three or four months, we have close to 7,000 small cells around the US that people have deployed and that are operational.

(08:43):

And in parallel with doing this work to marry a Helium way of building networks with our know-how, making it very simple to deploy, we started talking to a whole bunch of operators, the mobile network operators as they call them in the US, about saying, "Hey, look at this network that we are building. How about you guys partner with us and integrate this network that we're building with your macro network?"

(09:17):

And we got to some degree of success there. We've announced a couple of partners, but at the same time it's also become clear that the carriers in general are very conservative and very importantly slow moving entities. So in our thinking of how we can further accelerate this? We've decided that an important pillar to doing this would be us actually eating our own dog food and launching our own people's carrier as we call it, which is Helium Mobile.

(09:54):

So this was the catalyst to the partnership with T-Mobile and the people's carrier announcement that we did recently.

Brian (10:01):

That's awesome. And so this people's carrier, this is essentially what people would expect from their normal iPhone or Android phone carrier 5G connectivity being able to make calls throughout the US. Is that right?

Boris (10:15):

Yes, that is absolutely correct. So it's basically a US nationwide network for cell phones that provides connectivity for data and voice globally. And what makes it unique is that unlike almost any other carrier, we are not exclusively using one macro network, but we're using the macro network of our partner, T-Mobile, which we've talked about, and we compliment that with the people built network that is basically being built by the Helium community using this very model that I have described.

(10:55):

So the back end to the service that the people yet to take advantage of is actually very much also built by the community.

Brian (11:06):

I see. So The Peoples Network quite literally means the network built by people who go in and they take the effort themselves to put up these infrastructure and then they're compensated in crypto for the effectiveness of that?

Boris (11:20):

Yes. That is correct. And that's the whole notion behind this concept of the people's carrier. And I think that the unique and interesting thing about it is that if you look at the mobile wireless industry at large, if you look, peek under the hood of how a mobile operator functions, there are always dozens of different entities that are collaborating under the hood to make a carrier. So if a consumer, you go to AT&T, you buy a cell phone, you buy a subscription, and then you just start using it.

(11:57):

But if you peek under the hood, it's not really almost one company. Any carrier is an entity that has assets in the form of wireless spectrum and there are subscribers. And then under the hood there is dozens of different organizations that actually do work to comprise a carrier.

(12:22):

So most carriers, they don't build their own radios, they don't build their own wireless software, they don't install or operate their own towers. Most of the time, don't even own and operate their own stores. So many different companies aggregated under one umbrella.

(12:40):

And I think that this notion of a people's carrier that we're trying to pioneer with Helium Mobile is all about using blockchain and crypto economics to dramatically improve the efficiencies of the value chain that is basically the modern day carrier. So instead of having dozens of different independent entities all shuffle paperwork between each other, but ultimately roll into this one umbrella of whatever, like AT&T, or Verizon, or whatever it is, you actually simplify a lot of this overhead by actually having the blockchain take care of it.

(13:25):

And probably the most capital intensive part of any carrier and the most complicated is actually building the network. So finding a location for deploying a radio, contracting with somebody who either builds a tower there or who maintains a building, then actually deploying it, maintaining, et cetera. So this is all very capital intensive, complicated process that usually involves a lot of entities that we are making significantly more efficient.

Brian (13:56):

Let's talk a little bit about that crypto element. I mean you yourself said that you consider yourself a normie and that you found yourself into this crypto environment. I think this is pretty unique because we, as a wallet, we see a lot of different players in the crypto space so much or just inherently digital. It's either DeFi or NFTs is the vast mass 95% of the use cases we see. This is very different. This is taking something that's very much real world cellular infrastructure and trying to incentivize a network around that.

(14:29):

I think also everything you described too, it seems other carriers may be more potentially top down, whereas this is almost a bottoms up movement of getting individuals to go out and create this network. To you, what is the importance of this Web3 element? Do you actually think this could be made without Web3? Or is Web3 really a vital ingredient to all of this?

Boris (14:54):

I mean, I think that this is next to maybe solving some of the problems in the financial space, probably the second biggest opportunity for the Web3, because from my standpoint, Web3 is really the key enabler, is the new way to coordinate economic activity. That's when various parties, I would argue. This is what the crux of where Web3 can unlock the most value.

(15:18):

And if you look at various industries, the mobile network industry is one where you have a tremendous number of different parties that are collaborating with each other with a tremendous amount of inefficiencies in between. So if you could, instead of having a company that is building and operating cellular towers, and a company that is building the radios, and a separate company that is operating the stores, and a separate company that is doing the RF planning, combine all of that using blockchain and coordinate the economic activity between these parties using blockchain and radically distribute the value that is created by this collaboration using crypto economics, you will cut out a tremendous amount of inefficiency from the value chain, and then consequently you can transfer this value to the end user, meaning the subscriber of the user of the cellular network.

(16:28):

So there's a few industries I think that they're like that, and I would argue that the cellular wireless space is up there and to the extent that you can apply this concept that Web3 allows more efficient collaboration and then better and more creativity around the economic activity between the different parties, can apply that to that space. There's an enormous amount of opportunity to unlock value.

Brian (16:54):

Yeah, I love that. I couldn't agree more. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about some of the partnerships that you've been mentioning, so.

(17:00):

The first one that you brought up is T-Mobile. What specifically does that partnership entail and what made them get involved with Helium Mobile?

Boris (17:08):

The network that we're building uses a particular type of wireless spectrum called CBRS. And this is a shared spectrum, which is a new innovative model that allows basically anybody in the US with just a little bit of money to get access to clean wireless spectrum that is usable for the cellular use case. That spectrum and the radios that are built to operate in that spectrum, the physical properties of it are such that the reach of the wireless radio is limited to a couple of city blocks. And because of that, using that technology, it's very challenging to build a network that would be contiguous and will provide contiguous coverage around the entirety of the US.

(18:00):

And obviously if you're building a wireless network and if we as Helium Mobile want to provide a service to our end users, nobody's going to be using a service where you only have it working around your house and then you leave and all of a sudden there is no service, and then maybe you traveled half a mile and then your friend has a cell, and then you have a service again, and then there's no service.

(18:23):

So you need to have contiguous coverage.

Brian (18:26):

Right.

Boris (18:26):

So no matter where you go, you always have access to your voice and data. And to make that happen, it's important for us to partner with a macro network operator with somebody who has the service throughout the US. So T-Mobile is that macro network operator that we partnered with. And the way that, as I mentioned, Helium Mobile works is that whenever there is Helium CBRS cell in range, the subscriber would use that cell, but whenever there is no cell it would use the T-Mobile service, so that's going to be the technical underpinning behind the partnership.

(19:07):

The business logic here is that for T-Mo, I think we are effectively another MV&O customer. So it's not uncommon for an operator carrier to resell their network to other wholesale customers. So the relationship between us and T-Mo is that we basically procure macro network capacity from them. We augmented with the Helium 5G coverage to create this hybrid network with The Peoples Network component in it, and we sell service to the end users as Helium Mobile.

Brian (19:48):

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I could definitely see that being an important and necessary piece for when you're launching this network to have a reliable fallback in the cracks there for continuous coverage.

(19:59):

One additional partnership you guys mentioned more recently was actually a breakpoint that you guys are going to be powering the Saga phone when it launches. So, Solana Labs initiative to showcase what they call SMS, the Solana Mobile Stack, where they're trying to push Web3 mobile. Why is this a big deal and how might Saga phone users benefit from something like Helium Mobile?

Boris (20:20):

So first of all, we are quite excited about the Saga partnership. The specific thing that I think is going to be the direct benefits to any Saga users is that all the Saga phones that are sold in the US will come with the 30 days of free Helium Mobile service. So people will get to actually experience the people's carrier on their Saga phones. But I think that there's also a tremendous benefit from the technical side.

(20:54):

So Saga phones, unlike any devices in a cellular space, have been designed top down to support everything required from a security standpoint for people to basically use them for performing different crypto-related operations, starting with the basic ones such as having a wallet on the phone that is also secure.

(21:21):

Now the concept of the people's carrier, like I said, around multiple parties collaborating to build this new type of carrier does not exclusively involve folks deploying small cells contributing to the network.

(21:37):

It also, equally importantly, involves the users of the network as the important building pillars. So I've explained how we have this concept of the macro network that is T-Mobile and The People's Network that is providing this non-contiguous supplemental coverage to the macro network.

(21:59):

Now, for this network to continue growing, it's extremely important for the builders to understand where it's important to deploy additional coverage. Because in some locations you might already have three people, like maybe your neighbor and your neighbor's neighbor already has a Helium 5G cell deployed, so there isn't additional value from you deploying yet another cell. But that information needs to be continuously fed into the blockchain and everybody needs to be aware of that information. So to that effect, the users of the people's carrier, they are not just exclusively the users, they're also contributors of that information of where is it that the coverage is needed.

(22:47):

And our approach to making it happen is basically the users are able, on an opt-in basis, to effectively share the information, share information about the experience on the network, share information about where they're using, what type of coverage, and then we use that information to ultimately feed into the community and have them build the network around it.

(23:12):

Now for sharing this information as a user of Helium Mobile, I get rewarded via mobile tokens, but this makes your cellular phone effectively into a cryptocurrency miner. And with that, it creates all of the same challenges around securing, making sure that people don't game it, et cetera, that you would see with any typical mining situation. So being able to securely store your keys to be able to perform these operations with the blockchain using a phone, so that we can know exactly based on your specific phone, how many tokens you should receive based on what information, et cetera. All of the security around that requires a different type of device.

(24:06):

And Saga and the work that has been done on the Saga phones is actually unique in that it's basically one of the few, if not the only device on the market that enables one to do it today.

Brian (24:18):

That's awesome. Well I pre-ordered Saga phones, so I look forward to playing around with the network on day one when it launches.

(24:24):

You hit on how essentially the phone becomes a bit of a cryptocurrency miner. Right now at the time of this recording, it's quite obvious the cryptocurrency market isn't a bit of a bear market. How has it been for Helium to be building during a bear, and what is on your guys' roadmap upcoming?

Boris (24:41):

Well, I mean this bear cycle is fairly recent, but I think that all of the Helium community historically was born out of a bear market. So the Laura based IOT network, that the Helium community has successfully built, originally was launched immediately after the recent downturn. And all of the building happened during the bear market.

(25:10):

At the time when the original Helium miner was launched, nobody wanted to touch crypto at all. That was a completely toxic concept. But then ultimately the team has focused on building through the bear market and then on another upswing, this is where Helium became the popular Helium that everybody knows it today.

(25:30):

Now, today we're just going for this other cycle again and we're just following the company culture mantra of just continuing to build through it and not focusing on the macro environment. And that's really the only way to do it.

(25:48):

So this is not like anything magically new, but it's actually oftentimes harder to do than to say. I think that in our case it's a little bit easier in that just the whole community culture and the culture of the folks at Nova is such that it's nothing new and people are just basically used to building through the bear cycles.

(26:13):

As far as the roadmap, I think I touched a little bit on it, but when it comes to Helium Mobile, what's extremely important to us is building the tooling to enable the community to actually create useful coverage. And it's particularly relevant to the cellular network versus a little bit less so for the lower network because of the properties of how the cellular network works, because the signal doesn't propagate very far, it's very hard to build a network that'll just blanket Earth using cellular small cells.

(26:54):

You can only sort of augment the existing network such as that of T-Mobile. And for that, you need to have intelligence in the system and tooling for the community to be able to understand where to place the radios, and you need to have the proper tuning within the reward mechanisms such that only useful coverage is rewarded. And I think that there's a whole bunch of work that needs to be done beyond what has already been created for the lower network to make that work for the cellular space. And I think that a lot of this is what we're focusing on.

(27:37):

Another pillar is about making wireless coverage hotspots more affordable for the community. So the CBRS space, the CBRS spectrum is relatively new. The CBRS small cells are relatively new. I would argue that the Helium CBRS network today is probably one of the biggest in the US, so we are leading the way, but because it's new, it's still fairly complicated and clunky and expensive to deploy a CBRS cell. So it's a lot easier than it was two years ago where it was near impossible.

(28:15):

But it's still a long way away from the simplicity of what you'd experience with, for instance, a wifi access point. And truly making a very large people-powered network requires that there's a lot more simplification for deploying the cellular hotspot, so that's another vector of engineering investment I think that we are spending our cycles on.

Brian (28:42):

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I guess as this network continues to improve, and you guys get feedback coming back, and you're fine tuning the crypto economic rewards, how do you see this whole space playing out? I guess both the crypto side of things, but also just how does this as The Peoples Network play out and challenge existing carriers, and what are you personally most excited about seeing?

Boris (29:05):

I am excited about the work that we are doing with other carriers that we have announced actually culminating in them formally joining via mobile DAO and becoming another operator on the network. So I think it's an interesting trend in that if you look at mobile space at large, there's been this push towards disaggregation and decentralization in the mobile carrier space in general. So when cellular communication became first possible, everything revolved around basically a carrier that sells you a phone that only works on that carrier and you have a cell number that only works on that phone on that carrier. And that was V1 of cellular communication, the complete lock end around a single entity. And over time, I think during the last, what, 25 years, 30 years of the industry existing, there's been this continuous push towards disaggregation.

(30:15):

So V2 was that you could have different phones and then you have different phones working on different networks and then people said, "Hey, my phone number is my property, and I want to be able to switch my phone number and carry it with me if I switch carriers." And the new thing now is, that's particularly becoming pronounced is carriers using multiple networks under the hood. So instead of just having one set of radios that work on the spectrum assets that you as a carrier have purchased, you also have relationships maybe with some of the other operators or some of the people that have built infill coverage certain locations, or maybe you operate with the wifi networks, Boingo that people have probably have seen. So this concept of carrier becoming less of the monolithic one macro network, but carrier becoming more of an aggregator of many networks.

(31:15):

And this is this next wave that we're seeing, and this is not related to specific layer crypto, blockchain, or Helium Mobile. This is just a thing that's happening by itself. And the reason why it's happening is because as more and more data finds its way onto your phone, you need to build networks that have bigger and bigger capacity. And the physics of it is such that the only way to do that is that you need to build networks that operate on higher frequency bands. And the higher the frequency band, the worst this band goes for walls and trees, so be short of the range. And because of that you need to have a lot of density. So if 20 years ago you could put one tower and cover a whole city of it, today you need to have many towers. And the more and more data is on the cellular network, the more and more of the cells you need.

(32:09):

And because of that, it's no longer economically viable to have a network where just one entity is basically building it. And because of that you need to have multiple networks working together. So I think that what we're doing with people's carrier and applying the blockchain to coordinating economic activity between many network creators and aggregating that into one network is a natural extension of where the entire cellular industry is headed.

(32:41):

So obviously we are super excited about eating our own dog food and launching the first people's carrier in the form of Helium Mobile, but I feel that we are just leading the way, and we're hopeful that additional carriers in the context of this trend that's already happening will start joining in the freight.

Brian (33:03):

That's great. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of tailwinds there that you described it. It's a really exciting time to be where you guys are in bailing this network to the world. Well Boris, this has been a really awesome discussion. I really look forward to using The Peoples Network on my Saga phone when it arrives.

(33:18):

One closing question that we asked to all our guests here on this podcast, and I'd love to hear it from you as well. Having been a normie entering the Web3 space is, who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Boris (33:31):

Yeah, it's a good question. As a normie. So as a normie, I really liked the StepIn app to be honest, that I still continue to play with. And I don't even care so much about the rewards or making tokens with it, but just the fact that it's really well built and it allows me to, it just almost forces me to get off the chair and walk around. Doesn't matter if I make money for it or not, but the user experience is quite amazing.

(34:03):

And this is just an everyday example of it, but at large what really makes me excited about the Solana ecosystem is the really quality of talent and the dedication of the different groups building on Solana at large. And one important thing that we haven't really discussed much about today is that all of Helium community is moving to Solana.

(34:35):

And I think that's part of the reason why that move's happening is because we are seeing tremendous amount of support from the Solana builder ecosystem and have gotten to interact with a lot of folks that are building for Solana. Even trying to do POCs, figuring out what it is like, what would the incarnation of Helium look like on the Solana L1 gave us a peek into what the quality of the talent and the passion of the community of top Solano looks like.

(35:08):

So I think that it's exciting to see. It's exciting to see so many smart people building and whenever you have a congregation of smart, passionate people building, there's always good things that come out on the other end. So maybe, I'll conclude on that note.

Brian (35:26):

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more from where I sit, develop a relationship. It's invigorating energy here. Anyone who is at Break Point, you probably didn't even sleep, because there's just so many people who are just in the builder mentality who love this space. And it's really awesome to see you guys leading the charge on the mobile front in this space as well.

(35:45):

Well Boris, this is really great. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people go to learn more about The Peoples Network?

Boris (35:52):

HelloHelium.com

Brian (35:53):

HelloHelium.com. All right. Well thanks again for coming on. Boris Renski, the GM of Cellular Wireless at Nova Labs.

Boris (36:00):

Thanks Brian.