Helium Network has seen some insane growth in the last couple of years in both holders and miners. Helium miners have revolutionized and provided people with a new way of mining coins, eliminating the need for expensive and wasteful hardware.

Helium miner is a simple, small and quiet device that once plugged into an outlet and connected to the internet can provide your community with low-power network coverage. In exchange for doing so, you will be rewarded with Helium ($HNT) tokens.

While the hotspot miner requires an internet connection, the first thought of many people interested in the hotspot involves data consumption.

Data consumption is basically anything that you upload or download using the internet connection. Watching Netflix, surfing the web, listening to a podcast or even sending an email requires data usage.
Now data consumption will vary depending on the type of activity you do while connected.

It is known that Netflix might consume anywhere between 250MB to 1GB per hour of watching, and sending an email will use a few kilobytes of data. Just to put things in perspective, 1MB = 1000 kb, 250MB = 250,000 kb, 1GB = 1,000,000 kb.

Now that we know that each device connected to the internet will use data, depending on the task. Let's checkout miner's internet requirements.

Will the Helium Miner Slow Down my Internet?

Not necessarily, however it depends on your current internet speed. If your current data plan is already pushed to the maximum, by having a couple TV’s running Netflix simultaneously while few other devices are connected to WiFi then adding a Helium miner might slow it down drastically.

While the average internet speed might vary by location, 42 Mbps is quite the average. If your household uses more than 4 devices at the same time, you might need to get above average internet speed for as long as you have the Helium miner connected.

Do you know your current internet speed? If not, trial and error.

Connect your hotspot, let it start mining.
Turn on your TV, play your favorite Netflix tv show. Multiply this by as many times as needed.

Your movie still loads, and the image quality is good? Perfect, your internet wasn’t slowed down to the point of being unusable.
Movie doesn’t load, or it takes too long to load, the quality is bad? It might be the time to switch to a faster internet.