The crypto-friendly company jumps the gun on calling its shared network '5G.'

I'm that 5G guy. I've actually been here for every "G." I've reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag.com, including every generation of the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also write a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsess about phones and networks.

Helium, the buzzy crypto-fueled shared wireless network that pays people to host hotspots, has been caught overstating its partnerships over the past few days. After Mashable discovered bikeshare provider Lime disclaiming involvement(Opens in a new window) with Helium and The Verge got Salesforce to say "Helium is not a Salesforce partner(Opens in a new window) ," PCMag can reveal now that none of the equipment sold as "Helium 5G" at the moment involves any of the common understanding of 5G.

The "Helium 5G" network is instead a 4G LTE CBRS network, which right now has significant advantages over 5G but doesn't have the "5G" moniker Helium and its partners wanted for marketing. So it's just calling it 5G because, apparently, anyone can use any word to mean anything.

Helium advertises its "5G" network prominently on its website by saying that "Helium 5G is here—the second major wireless network supported by the Helium blockchain." Its partners include two carriers, Dish and GigSky, as well as five hardware providers—FreedomFi, Baicells, MosoLabs, CalChip, and Bobcat.

The play works like this: You buy a FreedomFi "gateway" box and a small cell. You plug the gateway box into your own wired internet. You then earn a crypto token called "mobile" for providing proof of coverage, along with more crypto for data transfers on your cell at a later date(Opens in a new window) . The "mobile" token converts to Helium's HNT token, which is tradeable on crypto exchanges. Then, Helium rents out the network to other cellular providers, whose customers would be able to use it to fill in gaps in coverage.

It's not a bad idea. Stephen Leotis, cofounder of MosoLabs, which makes small cells for the Helium network, says the crypto scheme lets Helium incentivize or deincentivize users where coverage is needed or not. If a Helium client wants coverage in Dubuque, Helium can offer better incentives in Dubuque, whereas if Pittsburgh is pretty saturated, Helium would hold off on rewards for new Pittsburgh hotspots.

But as a long-time veteran of the 5G badge wars, this analyst can say that one of the few things the industry has agreed on, until now, is that to call something "5G," it has to be using a radio encoding known as 5G NR somewhere in its system. (Here's Qualcomm saying that outright(Opens in a new window) .) Carriers play pretty fast and loose, but 5G NR has been the red line.

Helium does not meet even that very low bar. All of its partners offer only 4G LTE running over the CBRS band, also known as b48. You can indeed run 5G over CBRS, but Helium's partners are not doing that yet.

Helium uses the CBRS band because parts of it are unlicensed, so they're not reserved to mobile carriers. While we've had commercial 4G CBRS for a year and a half now, the technology to do 5G over CBRS is very new: Verizon just started rolling it out last month.

One future Helium partner, MNTD, promises an all-in-one, 5G NR hotspot toward the end of this year, but it isn't on the market yet.

Right now, all of the radios being used in Helium's network are 4G LTE, not 5G, and no device connecting to the network will have a 5G connection.

FreedomFi's Boris Renski says using 4G over CBRS has significant advantages to 5G NR, but he's calling his LTE 5G anyway.

"We admit that we call this setup Helium 5G vs. LTE because it sounds cooler. If everybody else in the industry can, so can we," FreedomFi says on its FAQ page. But "everybody else" isn't doing that. Only the participants in the Helium ecosystem are.

"5G is a sexier name," Leotis says. "The FreedomFi gateway and the core that's built on the Magma platform are 5G ready, but the radios themselves, they are LTE today."

FreedomFi's argument is that you can call something 5G if it has a "5G-compliant architecture for the network core" but has no 5G radios. I have never heard that argument from anyone else in the industry; the general minimum standard for 5G is that somewhere, somewhere, there's a 5G NR radio involved.

"5G ready" and "5G compliant" are not 5G. If I am ready to rock, I am prepared to rock, but I am not actually rocking at that time. I'm telling you I could be rocking in the future, on short notice. But at that moment? Not rocking. Even AT&T doesn't go as far as FreedomFi. When it calls its LTE network 5GE, it leans on the "E" to say, it's not calling it 5G. That's still shady, but it's less shady than what FreedomFi is doing here.

Helium is also implying greater coverage for its 5G network than currently exists.

The Helium Explorer(Opens in a new window) says there are currently 2,009 "5G hotspots" in 47 US states. The map's minimum resolution is a hex 1km on a side, and in a quick test in New York City, I saw no more than 70-meter range on the Helium LTE hotspots I detected. That means Helium can fill in broad areas on its map but only be providing service in small spots.

After publication of this story, Helium responded, "the purpose of the map is to show hotspot locations. The large hexes you see on the map are a way to offer some obscurity and privacy, it's not intended to be a coverage map." But by shading in entire 1km hexes rather than, say, using dropped pins to indicate individual hotspots, they are strongly implying significant coverage in their 1km hexes. It's tricky, like so much about Helium's marketing. Below, you can see how much coverage there really is.

Right now, GigSky(Opens in a new window) has the only way consumers can use the new network. Folks with CBRS-compatible phones (b48) can download the GigSky app and pick the "Helium Bundle," which costs $60 for 60 days and includes 5GB of data on major US networks, plus unlimited data on the Helium network. As we've covered before, Dish has an arrangement with Helium but a lot of the elements are murky.

I signed up for the GigSky service on an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S22+ with the NetMonitor Pro application(Opens in a new window) and took it out for a walk across several of Helium's covered hexes in NYC. The GigSky service is on AT&T most of the time, using a single LTE channel of varying LTE bands.

For brief moments in my test, the phone dropped to a strangely badged, lower-case "lte" mode with no frequency band information available. I have to assume that's Helium. Interestingly, the Helium network didn't appear to have its own mobile network code or standard cell IDs. The phone's field test mode said it was on AT&T the whole time.

Part of the mapping issue may be a difference between how the Helium network is being deployed and the way most people understand coverage in a publicly available mobile network. According to Helium, 78% of its hotspots are "indoor" hotspots, which may only be providing coverage within a single building. In the West Village of Manhattan, I got a brief Helium blip on the patio of The Standard Hotel. Its crowded, noisy outdoor bar is a perfect place to add supplementary cellular capacity. But just as 4G LTE is good, it isn't 5G, so a network at the Standard Hotel is good to have, but it isn't a 1-kilometer-by-1-kilometer hex.

Helium is very early in its rollout, advertising now as part of its "mobile genesis" period where it's just getting up and running. But like with calling 4G "5G" when it isn't, making whole hexes of a map appear covered when it's really just small spots feels not entirely honest.

Renski and Leotis say 4G LTE is a better choice for CBRS spectrum at the moment, but they'll call it 5G anyway.

Their first argument is that CBRS doesn't have the channel sizes to make a performance difference between 4G and 5G. That isn't entirely true. With 4G, CBRS channel sizes go up to 20MHz; 5G can use up to 100MHz channel sizes in this band, so there is in fact a potential advantage. Leotis notes that the cloud system that negotiated between shared CBRS users is likely to give smaller channel allocations in densely populated areas.

Renski and Leotis also say 5G CBRS equipment will be more expensive.

"The 5G radios are incredibly expensive, and you're going to pay a lot more for 5G for what we view as very little value on top of CBRS," Leotis says.

MNTD's hotspot bundle is anticipated to cost between $1,500 and $2,000 according to the company's site, which is competitive with MosoLabs' $1,800 LTE + gateway bundle. Of course, MNTD isn't selling that yet, so it can claim whatever it wants.

The more important kicker is that 4G CBRS phones and small cells are widely available, and 5G ones are not. Most US phones released in the past two years have 4G CBRS. But generally only this year's phones, with a few exceptions, have 5G CBRS. So if Helium wants to start with equipment its partners can sell and create a network most people can use, it's making a smart choice with CBRS LTE. It's just calling it by the wrong name.

In a blog post, Helium founder Amir Haleem disclaims any responsibility(Opens in a new window) for calling his network "5G," shifting the blame to FreedomFi, where Rensky uses his extremely unusual definition of 5G to add another "G" to his 4G LTE small cells.

The thing is, FreedomFi made the right choice. 4G isn't going away. More phones support 4G CBRS than 5G CBRS. The 4G equipment is likely to be more available, and cheaper, than the 5G equipment for a while.

But "Helium 4G," alas, doesn't have the future-forward marketing pizazz that attracts big-name venture capital dollars. When the truth conflicts with a good story, the good story usually wins, but it's still worth pointing out the truth.

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I'm that 5G guy. I've actually been here for every "G." I've reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag.com, including every generation of the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also write a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsess about phones and networks.

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