Are you the owner of an Helium Hotspot ?
So you connected your hotspot, then appears a warning saying : “Relayed”
This post will help you by fixing this issue and avoiding relayed status who makes you lose a lot of potentials HNT per day
What means Relayed on the Helium Network ?
Helium hotspots talk to each-other over your internet connection to validate their jobs :
– Challenger (0.9%)
– Proof Of Coverage (5.02%)
– Witnesses (20.08%)
– Network Data Transfer (35%)
Your hotspot becomes “relayed” when other hotspots cannot reach directly yours over the Internet, so it will have to pass directly by the others Helium hotspots to communicate with you, which will impact the network and adding pressure to others Helium hotspots to relay your infos.
Why this happen ?
Today our networks at home are managed by our ISP provider routers, like most of the routers on the market, they use the NAT (Network Address Translation), to allow all your devices with different internal IP addresses at home to connect to the Internet with one unique IP from your provider (WAN), this is perfect for Outgoing traffic.
But in our case, we need to have also Ongoing traffic, which means we have to use the unique IP from the provider (WAN) to talk directly to our specific device at home.If you send data to your unique IP (WAN), they your router will not understand by default where it has to go, until you explain him how to handle a specific data to a specific device inside our internal IPs (LAN)
⚠️ Note that we talk about an Helium Router, which is a very specific device, most of the ‘mainstream’ devices are handled automatically by the new routers with (UPnP), even some Helium Hotspots have no issues⚠️
How To Fix :
You can fix your hotspot being relayed by port forwarding the required ports to your Helium hotspot on your router, this allows the hotspot’s peer to peer connectivity directly without being relayed via another node.
The port you need to forward to your hotspot device is:
44158 – TCP
You can check Port Forward to see if you find your router model to know how to do a Port Forward easily
⚠️it may take up to 24 hours for the network to work out your hotspot no longer requires relaying⚠️
