Bobcat Miner, the leading manufacturer of Helium compatible hotspots, announced today that it will launch the Bobber 500 in April of 2022. The Bobber 500 will mine HNT cryptocurrency by providing both cellular and LoRaWAN wireless coverage. Partnered with FreedomFi and built using their firmware, the Bobber 500 will be plug-and-play compatible with all CBRS small cells that have been certified for the Helium Network.  

Named after the over 400,000 people community of self-proclaimed “bobbers”, the Bobber 500 boasts an industrial-grade design with award-winning product durability and increased lifetime. Featuring 64GB storage and 4GB RAM, the Bobber 500 runs on the Intel 10nm Atom embedded CPU released in 2021.

“We’ve worked closely with FreedomFi engineering and security teams to ensure that Bobber 500 meets all quality and security standards required by the Helium data offload partners,” said Yiming Wang, Co-founder of Bobcat Miner. “Bobber 500 uses Trusted Platform Module technology to provide hardware-based encryption of all data on the system to ensure maximum capability.” 

“We’re thrilled to see companies in the ecosystem such as Bobcat and FreedomFi work together to enable anyone and everyone to have access to decentralized wireless connectivity. This is just the beginning for Helium 5G,” said Frank Mong, the COO at Helium.

“We may have jump-started the crowd-sourced cellular concept by launching our own gateway and radio, but our ultimate goal is to enable other hardware manufacturers and small cell vendors to adopt open-source software powering decentralized wireless architecture,” said Joey Padden, CTO, and Co-founder at FreedomFi. 

“Crowd-sourced cellular will be as disruptive to telecom as the Internet was to computing and we want to be the trusted partner to hardware vendors and telecom operators looking to navigate this space,” said Boris Renski, Co-Founder and CEO at FreedomFi. “We are honored to partner with #1 manufacturer in the Helium ecosystem to help launch Bobber 500 and look forward to a long-term relationship.”

March 3rd, 2022 marks the one year anniversary of Bobcat Miner’s global debut as an integrated service provider empowering the growth of the global decentralized blockchain community network. In 12 months, Bobcat Miner has delivered over 240,000 hotspots to “Bobbers” worldwide. This makes Bobcat the #1 manufacturer in the Helium ecosystem with over 30% market share of deployed Helium miners. During this same period, the Bobcat community has grown to more than 400,000 with over 43,000 active Discord members and it’s still growing. The Bobcat was voted as “The Favorite Hotspot” manufacturer of 2021 by the global Helium community. 

All current and future small cells certified by FreedomFi will be compatible with the Bobber 500 following the launch of FreedomFi Gateway and FreedomFi One CBRS small cell. FreedomFi’s partnership with Baicells to certify a portfolio of small cells for plug-and-play compatibility with their FreedomFi firmware gives even more options to the Bobber 500.