How much data does a Helium Hotspot miner use?
The question that arises here, if we only need electricity and an internet connection, is how much data do Helium Hotspot Miners use? The official website of Helium indicates that Helium Hotspots use about 30-50 GB per month. If we compare this number of data usage with services such as Netflix, it’s nothing. Netflix says that a user uses about 1GB of data per hour for streaming a TV show or movie in standard definition but this increases up to 3GB of data per hour when streaming HD video.
The streaming of high-resolution videos can increase the data usage up to 7GB per hour, according to BuckeyeBroadBand.
We have also seen an increase in data usage of Helium Hotspot recently. A user complained about the data consumption by Helium Hotspot on Reddit. He further said that this too much data consumption issue must be resolved by the Blockchain. Amirhaleem, the founder of the Helium project & moderator on the Subredit admitted the increase in data consumption by Helium Hotspot. He elaborated that this issue will be resolved after the transition of the network to light Hotspot infrastructure. He detailed:
“TLDR – we’re working on improving this, it’s an unfortunate consequence of such a massive peer-to-peer network, as every Hotspot serves blocks to every other Hotspot (and the blocks are getting bigger). once the network transitions to the light hotspot architecture in the next few months we won’t have this problem anymore”.
All of us should understand that the Helium blockchain is aiming for a greater cause and there will be problems on the way. The main thing to take from this is that they are acknowledging this issue and trying to resolve it.
In conclusion, the amount of data and electricity a Helium Hotspot miner uses is negligible, therefore not an expensive miner to run, provided you have an unlimited data plan.
