Helium Urges FCC to Bring Open Wi-Fi Networks Into the Future of 911
Published Aug 13, 2026
Nova Labs, the company that founded and continues to support the Helium Network, has formally urged the Federal Communications Commission to make open interoperability a foundation of America’s transition to Next Generation 911.
In comments filed in FCC Dockets 21-479 and 13-75, Nova argues that emergency communications should work across providers, jurisdictions and network technologies without depending on proprietary interfaces. It wants the FCC to establish a uniform, technology-neutral federal minimum while allowing states and local 911 authorities to adopt stronger requirements.
The filing is significant because it presents community-deployed Wi-Fi as more than a consumer connectivity product. Nova believes networks such as Helium could eventually complement cellular infrastructure during indoor coverage failures, large traffic surges and natural disasters.
What Helium Is Asking the FCC to Change
The FCC’s proceeding concerns interoperability between Next Generation Core Services providers and Emergency Services IP Networks. Nova supports the FCC’s definition of interoperability as the exchange of voice, text, data and multimedia regardless of jurisdiction, equipment, software or service provider, and without proprietary interfaces.
Nova argues that the FCC should turn that principle into an enforceable baseline built around open, consensus-developed standards, including SIP-based handoffs and the National Emergency Number Association’s i3 architecture. Conformance testing, it says, should measure compliance with open standards instead of compatibility with one vendor’s implementation.
The company also wants the framework defined broadly enough to accommodate different originating networks, including Wi-Fi Calling. Its position is that interoperability should not end at transfers between conventional 911 providers if cellular and Wi-Fi networks cannot work together across the wider emergency call path.
A Potential Backup When Cellular Networks Struggle
Nova supports its argument with several examples of Helium infrastructure operating under difficult network conditions. During Hurricane Helene in September 2024, more than 80% of cell sites in the hardest-hit areas of western North Carolina reportedly went offline. Helium deployed portable hotspot beacons using Starlink backhaul, while the Land of Sky Regional Council and disaster-response nonprofit Team Rubicon used beacons to provide connectivity in affected communities.
The filing also says Helium infrastructure absorbed a 550% traffic surge during Mardi Gras and served more than 100,000 additional mobile users through standards-based carrier handoff. In San Jose, the network handled a 32% increase in connections during Super Bowl LX weekend. At a festival in Golden, Colorado, traffic reached 300% of baseline without a reported service outage.
In Redondo Beach, California, Helium carrier offload was enabled through the city’s existing Wi-Fi to reconnect a waterfront district where high-rise buildings had obstructed cellular coverage. According to the filing, the system now connects more than 2,000 users per day and has been extended into the basement of the city’s police department.
These figures and performance claims come from Nova’s filing and its supporting white paper. They demonstrate how Wi-Fi offload has handled ordinary data connectivity, but they do not prove that Helium currently operates as an independent 911 network.
The Important Limitation
Nova explicitly states that it does not originate 911 traffic, operate an Emergency Services IP Network or provide Public Safety Answering Point-facing facilities. Helium’s existing role is carrier-neutral Wi-Fi offload using Passpoint, a standard that can automatically authenticate participating subscribers without manual configuration.
The proposal is therefore about what could be built on top of these networks. Nova wants carriers to support location-by-reference queries from credentialed Wi-Fi offload operators. Under that model, a carrier handling a Wi-Fi call could query the operator’s Location Information Server and retrieve the access point’s civic and geographic location for routing to the correct emergency center.
That could provide more precise indoor information than tower-based routing, particularly when an operator has recorded a building, floor, suite or unit. Nova says fewer than 1% of wireless 911 calls currently arrive with a dispatchable location, although that figure is drawn from the company’s interpretation of FCC material and should not be treated as a measure of Helium’s present capabilities.
Why This Matters for Helium
Nova reports that the Helium Network now includes nearly 140,000 U.S. hotspots serving more than three million daily users. If the FCC eventually recognizes credentialed Wi-Fi offload networks within emergency-routing and interoperability rules, Helium’s distributed infrastructure could gain a new public-safety use case alongside its commercial carrier-offload business.
There are still technical and regulatory challenges. Wi-Fi depends on power and internet backhaul, handoffs between access points can interrupt connections, and devices without a participating subscription cannot currently rely on Passpoint in the same universal way that cellular networks must accept emergency calls.
My takeaway is that this filing is not an announcement that Helium has become a 911 provider. It is an argument that emergency communications should be able to use whichever standards-compliant network remains available. If the FCC adopts that broader approach, decentralized Wi-Fi infrastructure could become a meaningful layer of resilience when traditional towers are congested, obstructed or offline.