Forget Franchising Restaurants – The New Small Business Is Building Your Town’s 5G Network

Web3 users are familiar with the concept of digital land, sometimes mapped to real-world cities, which allows them to purchase plots, build properties, engage in commerce, and hang out with their neighbors. It’s fun, creative, and can even be rewarding. But for all its merits, what happens in the metaverse stays in the metaverse. It has no impact on the real-world cities that these metropolises are modeled.

But what if you could not only acquire a digital plot of land that corresponds to your city, but also build a mobile network on it and earn a percentage of all the data revenue generated? This isn’t a metaverse game. It’s the new frontier of small business enterprise, and it’s exactly what World Mobile is aiming to create with its new Network Builder platform.

Don’t Call It a Metaverse

World Mobile’s Network Builder is a digital concept with physical outcomes. The platform effectively turns complex telecom infrastructure into a franchise-like opportunity. Instead of buying the rights to sell coffee or burgers in your hood, you acquire a Hex NFT.

Each NFT may be unique, but this ain’t no digital collectible – it’s a verifiable, digital license to operate a World Mobile network within a specific, real-world geographic area. This model allows entrepreneurs and organizations to own a stake in the network they help build and to capture the upside as it grows. It’s a bold concept, but will it work? Let’s examine the evidence.

From Auction to Action

For an aspiring entrepreneur seeking a viable business opportunity, World Mobile’s Network Builder is an intriguing proposition. It’s one that doesn’t call for rising early to mop floors, prep food, and organize rotas. But that’s not to say that it’s an entirely passive form of income: there’s still work to be done, and it starts with research.

Using World Mobile’s ‘Opportunity Map’ and ‘Modeled Hex Reward’ (MHR) system, the first step is to analyze data to identify profitable, high-traffic areas based on population density and network data.

Next, you acquire the rights to start serving mobile data by participating in an auction to secure the Hex NFT for your chosen geographic zone. Once you hold the rights, you can start to build. This involves deploying or coordinating the physical infrastructure, in the form of AirNodes, and onboarding local hosts and agents to help run the network.

Finally, you earn. Once your Hex is fully enabled, you’ll receive a share of up to 5% of all the network revenue generated in that zone. This entire process is tracked through a milestone-based system, ensuring accountability and rewarding tangible, real-world progress.

De-Risking Your Investment

For any aspiring business owner, a data-driven approach is critical, since this de-risks the investment. Because when it comes to entrepreneurship, hard data trumps gut feelings every time. It’s one thing to have a hunch that a particular business might do well in your area; it’s quite another to have the data points to demonstrate it.

The Modeled Hex Reward (MHR) system developed by World Mobile provides a transparent, data-driven forecast of potential returns, based on metrics such as population density and existing network data. As a result, there’s no need to engage in blind speculation and start wildly buying up AirNodes only to discover that your area is already covered.

Instead, you can make an evidence-based business decision in a manner more akin to analyzing foot traffic for a new storefront than gambling on a digital asset.

The Bigger Picture: A New Playbook for Infrastructure

The model being pioneered by World Mobile represents a fundamental shift in how core infrastructure is delivered. For decades, essential public infrastructure like mobile networks has been the exclusive domain of a few giant corporations. The Network Builder platform changes that, putting the tools to build, own, and monetize this infrastructure directly into the hands of individuals and communities.

This isn’t about “corporations bad, people good” sloganeering. Rather, it’s about empowering people to make decisions that will benefit themselves and those around them. The endgame isn’t to topple corporations: it’s to provide an economic incentive for communities to close the connectivity gap. It’s the equivalent of a neighborhood, tired of their local authority failing to fix the potholes, teaming up and tackling the task themselves.

Only in this case, no permission is needed: it’s simply another mobile service springing up, which happens to be operated by the people, and at lower cost, thanks to the elimination of fixed overheads such as premises and payroll. This is less “power to the people” and more “powered by the people.”

Your Signal, Your Share

World Mobile is confident that its Network Builder program will resonate, anticipating strong demand for its franchise-based model. It believes it can attract entrepreneurs looking for the next big opportunity, and who recognize the value in being early. Particularly when being early means securing the exclusive rights to deliver data within a specific geo-location.

The first auctions are opening in the USA, and if they prove successful, the model is expected to be rolled out globally eventually. That’s a whole lotta land waiting to be claimed. The upside, if World Mobile can deliver on this, is effectively uncapped, but we’re talking trillions of dollars of revenue transferred from the telco giants to localized entrepreneurs.

There’s money in this, then, but just as importantly, there’s opportunity. Specifically, the opportunity to claim a stake in an emerging business model that empowers communities to operate and own the networks they rely on every single day.