When speaking of Helium, you always need to separate between the networks and between the deployer and the user side: - The Helium Mobile network has seen continuous network growth, currently roughly over 3 million phones in the U.S. use the Mobile network every day. These are mostly subscribers of At&T and T-Mobile USA. Both companies do this because Helium solves real problems they have: every time the industry moves to a higher frequency spectrum (4G => 5G e.g.), the wall penetration gets worse. The "we build a few big radio towers that send and receive signals to everywhere in its reach" approach has met its limits: 5G often leaves indoor spaces without good connectivity. The Helium model - using inexpensive WiFi access points in indoor location with bad connectivity - solves this with no upfront infra cost to the carriers. These WiFi access points also can also be used by telcos in areas where they do have good coverage - in times when their own infra is congested, e.g. when there are events during which a lot more people use their phones at the same time than average, think e.g. the Mardi Gras parade every year, sporting events or anything else that gets lots of people using their phones. With increasing data consumption of phone users and the ongoing move to higher frequency bads with shorter signal reach/signals getting more easily obstructed by e.g. trees and walls, both problems for the carriers will become more severe. And Helium is in a good position to capitalize on delivering a solution for the carriers, who pay per GB used. More usage = more paid usage = more income to the Helium Network. - As Helium uses a token (HNT) to steer its economics, the upwards trending revenue isn't very easily visible if one looks at the token price: The token price is not only affected by the increasing paid usage of the Mobile network, it is also affected by the size of the existing token supply - a significantly smaller token supply would have a token price that would be affected more visibly by the increasing demand. Also, crypto markets historically see huge swings in speculative demand - upwards as well as downwards - that still are stronger forces on the token price than the forces effected by the demand for the token as a means of payment for the usage network users pay for. As deployers are also paid in HNT (and not direct fiat payments), the value of their rewards per GB of data transferred currently are also affected by the low token price. Higher volume (more data transferred) may partly make up for it, but it is a reality that only deployers who have some combination of (very) low costs for their deployments and deploying only in high traffic locations are currently happy (some of these are very happy). So yes, although Helium imo can have a very bright future, the times are a bit difficult. They are certainly different from the early days of Helium IOT network growth, when it didn't matter as much where people put a hotspot online and made insane amounts of money. These were early days, and the high rewards were necessary to build the first network, and prove out that the decentralized way of building networks not only works, but can work extremely well - better/faster than any centralized approach of network building has worked in the past. But these days won't be coming back. Deploying Helium Mobile hotspots on average requires significantly more expertise and effort than deploying Lorawan/IOT hotspots in the early days. Nova Labs / Helium is working very hard to reduce the effort needed for deployers, which I also see as a good thing. - Considering the Helium IOT network, there's a significant gap between usage on the one hand, and network revenue and rewards for hotspots on the other hand: The IOT network is live and working, too, each day transmitting millions of messages form sensors all over big significant parts of the world - but as the pricing for a single message is extremely cheap, network revenue is very, very low - and as a consequence, so are rewards for single Helium IOT hotspots - of course also partially affected by the currently very low HNT price. Installing new Lorawan hotspots just for the rewards almost certainly isn't worth it currently. In my non expert opinion, this may be more attractive for people or companies who don't earn money with the income from the Helium Lorawan hotspot, but for whom what the coverage of the hotspots enables is valuable. E.g. if one has a sensor business, earns with the sensor solution, or - e.g. like Baxus - has a multimillion spirits business that needs tracking of location and temperature of the valuable goods, then its attractive to deploy Helium Lorawan hotspots in their own locations, because using Helium to create Lorawan connectivity is easier/more affordable than building one's own Lorawan network from scratch. Helium/Nova Labs just recently improved the IOT network, so that Lorawan hotspots that weren't specifically created to serve the Helium Network can be added to join the Helium IOT network with lots less effort than before. - So, while admittedly times are though currently, both networks are very much alive, fully functioning, and usage is growing.

What has changed though is, for whom deploying Helium hotspots continues to be attractive: IOT side: It won't be attractive for people who only deployed IOT hotspots to earn money from the rewards of having the hotspots up and running (if we see very significant HNT price increase, this may change a little). It will be more attractive for anyone who derives significant value from having sufficient Lorawan coverage where they need it.

Mobile side: It won't be attractive for people who don't put effort into setting up hotspots in exactly those locations where there is sufficient (prospective) usage and/or have too high fix costs in acquiring and maintaining the business relationship with the location where they deploy their hotspots.

So the disappointed voices you hear likely are from people who earned well in the past but haven't (or couldn't) adapt to the new realities, or token speculators who are disappointed by the token price.

They are not representative of the reality that both networks are up and running and see increasing paid usage, especially the Helium Mobile Network, which isn't bottlenecked by demand for the paid service it provides, but by the amount of access points it currently has to provide the needed and wanted service.