 So speaking of FreedomFi, next we have Boris Rinsky, the co-founder and CEO at FreedomFi, the open 5G company on a mission of democratizing wireless connectivity. Prior to FreedomFi, he spent 12 years of his career in the open source cloud infrastructure space as the co-founder and CMO at Morantis and board member of the OpenStack Foundation. Joining Boris is Mark Phillips. Mark is the VP of business development at Helium. Mark and his team focus on expanding the footprint of the Helium blockchain and the wireless networks underpins. Please welcome Boris Rinsky and Mark Phillips. All right, sound check. Okay, so first of all, I wanted to thank Marielle. Now that we're going immediately after her, actually the first part of the presentation, I meant to actually tell a little bit about what we do, but I think she made my job quite easy and I don't have to spend too much time on it. So moving on to the actual content, what we're gonna be talking about is using Magma and Helium blockchain to build the world's first people's neutral host network. I'll start with what we do. I think some of it has been already talked about. So most of the team on our side comes from the open source world and our competence really about taking open source projects and making them actually super easy to use for the masses. So our product really is an opinionated distribution of Magma that makes it super easier for anybody to very quickly bring up a small scale private cellular network. And the approach that we take is we don't actually make our own radio. We rely on a whole bunch of partners for radio. So you can go ahead and buy a radio of your own. There is a whole bunch of commodity small cells that are available on the market today that are fairly inexpensive. Then we ship a piece of hardware called the FreedomFi Gateway into which you can plug in your radio. And after that, you are logged into a SaaS hosted portal, insert the list of your SIM cards, and voila, you have your network running. And as I think it's obvious, we heavily rely on Magma for pretty much everything that we do. The FreedomFi Gateway on the inside is basically a hardened and pretested version of the Magma access gateway. And our SaaS portal is based on the Magma orchestrator. And that's us. So I won't spend more time on us. And I'll hand off to Mark to talk about film. Great. Thanks, Boris. Do you mind just driving the slides? I think they'll make it a little bit easier from my side. Cool. So thank you very much to Kendall and Phillip and the conference for having Boris and myself here to speak about FreedomFi and Helium. That talk that preceded us by Miriel was fantastic. And it leads, I mean, I'm not sure if this was by design, but it leads remarkably well into the sort of thing that Boris and I are going to talk about. And I have not been in the Magma community for a long time. Just like a handful of weeks. But what I can say is it seems remarkably positive and very, very sort of fast moving and very thrilled for Helium to be taking part in this. So most of you probably have not heard of Helium yet. So feel free to drop questions, by the way, in the Slack channel or in chat. We'll grab them afterwards. My name is Mark Phillips. As Boris mentioned, I run business development at Helium. I've been with the company for about seven years. Helium builds people powered networks. So we were founded about seven years ago, exactly seven and a half years ago. And we've always been sort of in the business of making it easier to ship connected services. So, you know, we started with Internet of Things devices or IoT devices, typically they're using, you know, what's called an LPU network. That should be a term that most people here are familiar with. And about three years ago, we sort of went back to the drawing board and said, how is it that we help our customers really build IoT devices on a network that sort of just exists? And so we integrated something called the Helium blockchain. So it's a brand new blockchain with a native token called HNT, which I'll talk about. And, you know, I don't have too long to sort of focus on Helium here, because I want to make sure that the full talk is talked about. But the story behind the blockchain is that we sort of joked about it as an incentive mechanism to get people to start deploying what is a Loroan network. And then after a handful of months of joking, we sat down and sort of wrote design spec. You know, some people call these white papers. And, you know, we kicked it around for a while, had a bunch of whiskey and said, man, this is a pretty good idea. So we landed on something called the Helium blockchain. That was about three years ago. We started shipping hardware into the field. And I'm going to show us some pictures of hardware in a second, about less than two years ago. I mean, the first city that the Helium network sort of put LPWAN coverage into. So when I say Helium network, I mean Helium, Inc. and our community and partners, was Austin, Texas. And then that was in August of 2019. We didn't actually start shipping hardware en masse until October 2019. And so since then we've built what is the largest contiguous LPWAN networks of Loroan in the world in just under 12 months, which is wild. So we're in just about 3,000 cities at this point across 60 countries. Again, these are people, company individuals running hardware on the Helium network providing Loroan coverage. There are 18,000 gateway nodes out there right now. So I'll say gateway, I'll say hotspot, I'll say minor. These are all things providing Helium network coverage, Loroan coverage across the world. We think we'll see 150,000 probably more than that by the end of 2021, which is just absolutely bonkers. What's really interesting is that we're sort of, we're seeing this sort of progression and who's deploying on the Helium network. And I'm going to sort of tie this into what we think working with FreedomPy is so promising, but was really back a little bit for me for us for one more second. So we've basically built the largest LPWAN network in the world with a community primarily, and this is more true early on than it is now, primarily who'd never heard of the wireless technologies that we're using. So they know about Wi-Fi, they know about cellular. Most people have not heard of LPWAN, especially Loroan. So we built the largest Loroan network in the world with people who did not know what it was. And so the incentive mechanism, right? The Helium blockchain in this token called HNT is really sort of what drove people to bring the network together. And the mechanism fundamentally is something called proof of coverage. I'll talk about that in a second. So go ahead, Doris. So when I talk about 18,000 miners on the network and 150,000 by the end of the year, I'm talking about things that look like this. So you've got the Helium hotspot and maybe actually be some people at this conference that are running one or maybe running five. Thank you for being part of the community. And then in the back there, you've got models from companies like Nebra and Easy Lincoln and RAC. These are ecosystem manufacturers that are manufacturing hardware that the Helium ecosystem has approved, right? And so, again, back to the 2018,000 number, there's 18,000 of these models out there. We think there'll be 150,000 plus of these plus some other ones on the network. And this is fundamentally due to the incentive mechanism called proof of coverage. So I'm gonna go ahead, Doris. So proof of coverage is the idea that when you deploy on the Helium network and you're deploying something that's part of the Helium blockchain, you are earning HNT for providing coverage. And I'm not going to go too deep into the mechanism on this talk, but you can go to docs.helium.com or explore.helium.com. We'll drop some of these links into the chat and into the Slack. We have very good documentation on what this means, but suffice it to say, if you are running a gateway or a hotspot on the Helium network, fundamentally what your gateway is doing is providing coverage for Helium's network users, right? So these are companies like Nawee Sensors and Lime Scooters and Victor Mousetraps who are sending IoT data over the Lower Wing link back to their cloud-based applications. And so the network and the blockchain specifically will reward you for providing coverage. And so there's sort of different layers of rewards, right? So if you're just issuing what we call a challenge, basically sending a message to the network, prompting people to sort of prove their coverage. You get paid for that in HNT. You get compensated in HNT for being part of the consensus group, which is securing and mining all the transactions. There's about five or six different layers. But what's really sort of fascinating about this, and this is what sort of Helium designed, is that although we started with Lower Wing, it can be applied to any connectivity layer, right? So 4G, LTE, 5G, 3G, Wi-Fi, it really doesn't matter. So if you go ahead, one more slide, Boris. I got two slides left here, I think, right? And I'll pick it back over to you. So these are a few screenshots from mappers.Helium.com. And again, we can share these links. So I think you can see this. So the city on the left is Chicago, and the city on the right is Oakland, right? So Chicago on the left and Oakland sort of East Bay, as they call it, on the right. And this is a picture showing actual mapped Helium network, Lower Wing coverage in these cities. And so these are location sensors with GPS modules attached to them sending data through the Helium network. If you go to mappers.Helium.com, you can see what the sort of legend means, but different colors represent different RSSI on the network. But this is ridiculous, right? These are people who are deploying Helium hotspots, incentivized by H&T and the Helium blockchain, providing unbelievable coverage. We're talking like cellular level coverage for devices and sensors in these cities. And these aren't the only two. There are probably, you know, 50 cities in the world that have this level of coverage, but we're expanding, you know, at a wild clip. And so we're really starting to see actual resilient telco grade LP wind coverage built by individuals and companies that are on the network. And so just want to bump it one more. We'll wrap this up and kick it back to you. So what we're seeing is early days, people involved in the Helium network were sort of hobbyists bleeding edge, sort of crypto enthusiasts. It's very easy to put a gateway on the Helium network. So the cost is remarkably low, you know, 300 US dollars, 400 US dollars and decreasing very quickly. So people started to deploy 10 of these, right? 15, 20. And so now to sort of tie us back into the sort of the Freedom 5 stuff here and, you know, 4G, 5G, we're seeing people sort of embraces at a telco grade level, repurposing tower assets and putting up what are just remarkably good coverage locations. So I'm forgetting the cities where these are. I think the one on the right is from the East Bay. It's a guy named Joey who's part of the network. Lower left, I think is in the Los Angeles area. And then I think the top two are somewhere in the Midwest. But, you know, the thing to take away here is that the blockchain, the Helium blockchain has incentivized people to build remarkably good wireless coverage. And we started with Laura Wain and in working with Freedom 5, and actually this is the first time anyone has found out about this. So I'm excited to sort of be talking about it. We think we can build fantastic, you know, 5G coverage, working with Freedom 5 in the backwood community. So I'll kick it back to you, Gors, but thank you. Yeah, thanks, Mark. So you've heard a little bit about Freedom 5 and you've heard a little bit about Helium. And I think this picture illustrates somewhat the concept that we can get to by combining the two efforts. Now, at Freedom 5 in general, we are, you know, always excited about open source. Not just because, you know, it's a permissive licensing model and it makes things super cost efficient, but because it's actually a completely new way to spearhead bottom-up innovation. And sometimes this innovation and experimentation leads to very disruptive outcomes. The reason why we are particularly excited about our work with the Helium team is because we genuinely feel that, you know, the whole decentralized wireless movement could result in a completely new way of building wireless networks. If you think about Linux and how it started, you know, the near-term motivation of building Linux was to basically produce a cost-efficient version of Unix, but in the end it became the engine that fueled the growth of the Internet. And I think that here with Magma, you know, the original motivation may be to make it inexpensive to connect the unconnected by decreasing the cost of wireless cores, but ultimately I think there's an opportunity for projects like Magma combined with the initiatives like Helium to actually completely disrupt the face of the cellular wireless industry. So needless to say, you know, when we're talking about smart contracts and blockchain, there's probably not a single industry out there that was on a blockchain decentralized project that came out and said that we're going to disrupt it. Yet the examples of that are not that many. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the near-term practical use cases that we're going after with our collaboration. And it's not the use case that maybe immediately comes top of mind where, you know, sell a whole bunch of, you know, bees and everybody starts mining and all of that is connected into this mega-global network and we kill AT&T and Verizon. So obviously that's not going to happen, but I think that there is a whole bunch of immediately practical applications for this combination that could bring a lot of value to the industry. So the first one, and it's interesting that we've actually already had a gentleman from Washington University to talk about it a little bit, is LTE of Load to CBRS. So we actually are currently working with a couple of MNOs and MVNOs to implement this into reality. This is really what we're focusing on near-term. And I'll talk quickly about what it looks like from the end-user standpoint and as well as from the architecture implementation standpoint. So from the end-user standpoint, imagine this picture. You get a CBRS private LTE kit, which is something that we at FreedomFy have recently launched and has been quite popular, which by the way altogether costs less than an ASIC-based Bitcoin miner today. So this entire box of stuff thanks to the commoditization and open source is now less expensive than a Bitcoin miner. You go and you set up your FreedomFy network following the QuickStart instructions, which are publicly available already. And we've set up now probably close to a hundred of these networks, ranging from one to 50 B's. And it's very quickly and it's super cost efficient and it's super fast. Lore-WAN connectivity is still used for actually informing the network about the status of any particular CBSD, whether or not the backhaul is available, how reliable the coverage of that specific node is. And this way the network has kind of the aggregate picture of the reliability of each individual node in the network. And that data can be synced through the existing kind of a Lore-WAN model that Healim provides. And the people operating each node earn rewards in the form of H&T for A, providing coverage using the proof of coverage model as well as for passing the data through the network. And then finally, the MNO and BNO is actually able to roam traffic into that network. And in addition to the MNO and BNO traffic roaming into that network, a person can actually go ahead and use that network themselves. So if it's, for example, like a private LTE campus network or to university or if it's just a couple of guys with a farm whom we have plenty of examples of, they can use that same exact network for their own use case but enable third parties to actually roam into it as well. So now a little bit about the high-level architecture of how that use case works. So with Magma 1.5, there is two important features that are coming out that are in the works now. I think that will be talked about when we talk roadmap. One is the S8 inbound roaming. And two is dual PLMN support so that you can have a network on one PLMN that is your private LTE network. And the second is going to be a separate PLMN coming from the MNO or MVNL. And again, I won't go super deep into the Magma architecture details. This is the standard Magma architecture here. The basically Magma AGW connected to VCBSDs. Magma orchestrator somewhere hosted in the cloud. You have a single VPN link to connect to VHSS or VMNL. And then for a common inbound roaming scenario where you actually unfortunately do still in most cases have to ship traffic based to the centralized core of VMNL. You have a link back to the gateway on the MNO side. So the next use case, and this is something that's on the roadmap that is also largely supported by Magma out of the box today but is not something that we're rolling out just immediately now is the carrier Wi-Fi. So in fact, the very first project that we ever did with Magma was carrier Wi-Fi offload. So when you are in MNO, you are congested LTE spectrum and you want to offload into the local Wi-Fi access points operated by some third party. You can use a component called carrier Wi-Fi access gateway. So the architecture here would be basically running that CWAG plus the HMT miner on the Freedom Fight gateway and the rest of the architecture is largely very similar. Now, one thing I want to underline is that this is an existing and up and coming thing. There are companies like, for example, there's this project Google Orion, which enables any small business get a bunch of Wi-Fi routers and then Google Fi will offload their MNO traffic into that Wi-Fi. Now, I think that the difference here is in my personal view the model of, you know, hey, deploy Wi-Fi router in your Starbucks and get paid $5 a month for Google or AT&T to offload the traffic there is generally utterly uninspiring because you get some money, but you don't really get to participate in the bigger reward of actually building that decentralized network. And the helium concept and the blockchain concept is actually where individual node participants are actually part of the bigger ecosystem where as this ecosystem grows and the value that it brings to, you know, the bigger wireless world grows with it, you get rewarded for it. It's like much like buying stock in the company. And that model is much more inspiring and I bet you that is why helium was able to deploy 17,000 plus nodes in 12 months. If helium model was, you know, by a Lora-WAN device and will pay you $5 a month indefinitely, I doubt the success would be the same. And then finally, and I think that some people have talked about this as well and this is a concept that is present in the world as well, less the blockchain piece and this is the people's fixed wireless access network concept. So there are, you know, just completely altruistic versions of it such as GUIFI.net or some of the other ones with smaller scale I think exist in the US, but generally it's a point-to-point and point-to-multipoint Wi-Fi based network for fixed wireless access where owners of certain real estate with access to wholesale bandwidth can broadcast that bandwidth from point-to-multipoint Wi-Fi to other people to catch it. And then there's those that spread it out and there's those that basically play a role of a relay and everybody gets compensated for their role. So today these things exist, but there is no compensation attached to the participants or in some instances where we have done deployments of fixed wireless access. I just know that the, you know, the wisps of the work where they would put the, you know, the ubiquity access points onto a silo and would give a guy free internet and that's the extent of sophistication of rewards distribution through that network. I think that this can be changed dramatically by actually applying the blockchain-based distribution of rewards into the system. So now really quickly about actually the architecture for that first deployment use case that we're talking about which is LTE to CBRS offload. So there's some easy stuff that we have been working on and we've done already and there's some not so easy stuff. So the easiest stuff is basically taking the, you know, existing FreedomFi gateway and running the Helium Miner software on it plus adding a Lora radio into the FreedomFi gateways. We actually have a prototype of that and it's already done and we've tested it and it's working. Now a slightly harder stuff is finding the right way to integrate the Helium blockchain with, so to speak, the LTE accounting ecosystem. And in doing that, we try to lean on kind of two concepts. One is we try to reuse as much of what's already present within the LTE architecture ecosystem as well as the Helium blockchain ecosystem without needing to change dramatically the sets of interfaces that each one is used to and at the same time also do it such that it's forward-looking because as you know, right now we're kind of in the paradigm of LTE moving to 5G. Most of the AAA in LTE happens using diameter with, you know, 5G, all of that's going away and we're going to the more like typical, you know, distributed systems, internet, HTTP type of approach. So to kind of explain this in more detail, I couldn't find a way but, you know, flash this completely nerd slide, but I think that if I, you know, just walk your fuel really quickly, as an example, it'll become clear. So on this slide, what we've done is we've basically shown the exact workflow of our interaction that's when all of the entities, UE, you know, the EPC miner, et cetera, for the initial UE attach and session initiation flow. And the stuff that is marked in black is basically traditional LTE and diameter kind of calls. The stuff that is marked in red is just, you know, standard HTTP type communication that happens sometimes inside of the helium blockchain, sometimes happens between the OCS and the miner itself. So the attached process looks like follows, you know, we send the attached request, the UE sends the attached request to, you know, B passes on the EMZ to the EPC and then this whole thing goes to OCS and we have this CCRI call into the OCS which is the standard diameter stuff. Now OCS basically, you know, sends now an HTTP based request over to the miner with a request to, you know, initiate the LTE session. And at this point, the miner creates basically, you know, sends a request to the blockchain and creates the session and then creates what's in blockchain referred to as a state channel. So there's a couple of concepts that blockchains use and that helium uses specifically that are very alien to the LTE world. One is this concept of a state channel and the other is more of like a LoRaWan specific concept which is the way to identify the devices on the LoRaWan network using DevAdder which is a unique identifier for each device. So we go through back and forth between the miner and blockchain. We create the state channel and the state channel is basically this off chain, as they call it, medium for which we can pass the packets. And once this whole process is finally concluded, what we need to do is we need to, you know, basically following again standard diameter calls grant quota and the quota gets granted by the OCS and that communication goes through diameter through the Federation Gateway and back out to the UE. And you have a kind of a discussion initiated. So the point of this flow is that we've tried to change virtually nothing about the way that the helium blockchain operates and that we use their existing concept of DevAdder. Only we use DevAdder for identifying an LTE session rather than a LoRaWan session. And at the same time, on the LTE side, we're actually using, you know, diameter calls such that, you know, the LTE world can understand how the accounting can be processed. So quickly about the roadmap, the, you know, running of the gateway, minor gateway that part is done. Right now we're working hard at this implementation of the minor to the OCS or CHF in case of 5G implementation. And another thing that we haven't talked about here, but we're also working on updating the helium blockchain itself to accommodate for the high throughput data types such as, you know, LoRaWan is very low data rate. And then in April we are targeting to actually start doing pilot deployments. So we are, you know, super excited about this. We want everybody to kind of join in and participate in this. So please, if you are interested, email us at helium at freedomfi.com. And, you know, if you're an MNO or a VNO and you want to pilot this, if you want to be, you know, if you own farmland or skyscraper and you want to deploy some nodes initially, or if you just want to contribute code and stay appraised, email us there and, you know, we can do a separate Q&A session about it. And that's all I had. Thank you. Hey Boris, hey Mark, thanks so very much. I think that that was a fascinating presentation and the idea of self-supporting deployments through blockchain is just an amazing concept. So Mark, you've hit what seems to be a winner here with that idea. We are a couple of minutes over your time, but I do, because of the nature of your talk, want to at least take one or two questions off the bridge. So if anyone has anything for... Quick question here. Prakash here. Do we have to have Luran presence in place where we want to implement this freedomfi? There is freedomfi. Okay, thanks. Okay, a couple more. Hey Boris, how fast are the transactions? Yeah, so we don't have the measurement here for that. Stay tuned until we'll have the data probably in the next two weeks. By transactions you mean like the attached transaction or just the throughput? I mean the attached basically. Yeah, yeah, so I don't have the, you know, I don't have the specific data on it just yet, but our goal is to make it, you know, comparable to what you would experience with a typical, you know, attached procedure in LTE. All right, that's not why we'll be tuning in. Okay, James. Hi, I'm wondering, do you use smart contracts or is that all, I mean, basically how do you handle the, is it just basically people can show up or they don't have to have any sort of prearranged agreement or what actually, how does that work? Yeah, the idea for this. Go ahead, Boris, take it. Yeah, so I mean from the standpoint of the user experience, the idea is to make it just as seamless as it is on, you know, helium blockchain today with Laura Wen. You know, we ship you an old, you stand it up and that's it. And after that magic happens. We take care of everything on the back end, including the spectrum access grants from SAS and the, you know, roaming contracts from MNOs, et cetera. If the question is more around like the logic of how the blockchain itself works, then probably that's more to mark. Yeah, so just generally the helium blockchain does not use any sort of smart contract is a real concept of the smart contract. And, you know, for the use case that we have, there's no real need for at this point, we've certainly explored it, but at this point there's nothing to open. Thanks.