Helium isn't your typical crypto company. Their vision is actually very lofty - build a distributed low data wireless network completely independent of phone providers and cable companies. And pay the people who own nodes a percentage of the $ earned thru the traffic flow of their node. The payment just uses crypto because the ecosystem is a nice fit. Everybody knows what miners are and that they make money. The prob…
The #1 model to make it work is ride on top of the cellular network which already offers wide (but not that wide) coverage. The #2 model is to have a plan and do the engineering to figure out where you need to put up towers. Even then it is really hard to get universal coverage.