Helium Miners have seen an unprecedented growth in demand creating a parallel market for people who were interested in mining but were not fortunate enough to put their hands on any GPUs/ASICS.

….and that market exploded, creating the same supply/demand issue as the GPUs market.

Tens of thousands of orders flooded the main manufactures which were already dealing with a computer chip shortage throughout the past 12 months. Result? Astronomical prices for a helium miner, some going three to even ten times more than the retail price.

If you are interested in the miner’s data usage, it means you are up to date with the above mentioned issues and I am sure you know how lucky you are to have put your hands on one of these bad boys.

So how much data a Helium miner uses?

Well, it depends.

Short answer: Way more than official sources tell you.

As of today, there are over 600,000 plugged in miners (hotspots) all over the world. In the last 30 days alone, more than 70,000 miners were added.
While many of the miners report an average of 30GB/month or 1GB a day, there are some instances of people reporting astronomical numbers.

What happens more exactly? How does the hotspot create this usage?

Hotspots earn Helium for building and securing the network and transferring device data. The amount of HNT tokens earned varies based on the type of work your miner performs, using what is known as Proof of Coverage (PoC). There are 4 types of work your miner will accomplish, which are Challengers, Proof of Coverage, Witnesses and Network Data Transfer.
All of the above mentioned types of work demand some sort of data usage, download (receiving data) or upload (sending data).

What is the largest data usage an Helium miner might use?

Based on my personal experience, my average receiving data per month stays between 8-10GB and 20-22GB for transmitting, however it looks like that’s not the case for everybody.
On different forums there are people that vehiculate numbers like 100GB, 150GB even 250GB for one hotspot per month which is absolutely insane and could potentially slow down your internet.

Just for comparison Netflix uses around 3GB per hour of streaming an HD movie.

Is the Helium team aware of the data usage issues? Is it normal?

I believe so.

The reason being that back in October of 2021, the team pushed an update that is meant to improve the hotspot bandwidth utilization and block gossip.
According to their statement, they have found that while the network expanded, the bandwidth utilization has gone up exponentially.

Will it work? Will see!