Startup Tackles Wireless Dead Zones With Balloons, Blockchain, and Cash Payouts

16.10.2023 - 16:49 / pcmag.com

Yet another wireless service jumped into the US market last month, but while the pricing on World Mobile’s lineup of travel eSIMs doesn’t stand out from the growing selection targeting new smartphones without traditional SIM card slots, the business model does.

London-based World Mobile aims to sell connectivity to travelers as well as people in wireless dead zones using what’s called a decentralized-wireless architecture.

“There are 2.7 billion people on the planet that are unconnected,” CEO Micky Watkins said in a conversation at the MWC Las Vegas conference. “We believe that through a community approach, through a sharing economy, through democratizing communications, we can speed the way this gets fixed.”

World Mobile’s strategy for fixing that involves selling “AirNode” cell sites to provide 4G connectivity in areas lacking it, then paying those buyers for their in-kind contributions to the network. The company further plans to provide coverage over broader rural areas with tethered balloons stationed from about 1,000 to 3,000 feet up.

Other companies have tried to set up wireless services on this kind of distributed basis but have found themselves on bumpy roads. 

The highest-profile one at the moment would be Nova Labs’ Helium Mobile, which combines resold T-Mobile service with connectivity from $249 hotspots to offer a $5 “unlimited” plan (as in, subject to a 5GB cap on mobile hotspot use). But those hotspots and that plan are confined to a launch market of Miami for now. And hotspot owners get paid not in cash but in a specialized cryptocurrency token.

World Mobile’s marketing materials include a fair amount of blockchain banter. Each eSIM, for example, gets registered on a blockchain, and the company has its own World Mobile Tokens (worth about $0.14 each as of Monday night) that can be earned by people who set up an “EarthNode” to help the World Mobile network function. 

Watkins did not explain the business upside for World Mobile of outsourcing back-office computing tasks to EarthNodes but emphasized that the payoff for AirNode owners will not require using a cryptocurrency wallet. 

“The users get paid in cash,” he said without specifying how much. World Mobile hopes to see a best-case payback time for an AirNode—starting at $5,000 for a model using band 48 unlicensed CBRS spectrum, but going up to $100,000 for a model with licensed band 71 spectrum—within one and a half to two years.

But for the math to pencil out, a would-be AirNode owner will need to be in a place with both crummy wireless coverage but also good-enough business-grade backhaul. 

Last Tuesday, World Mobile announced one solution: a partnership with the Salem, Ore., fixed-wireless provider Adaptive Broadband to support