Drones take 5G to new heights

In a quiet field in rural Missouri, usually the only things fluttering through the tall grass are butterflies and birds. But on an April day in 2022, a Flying COW took to the skies, ushering in a first for AT&T by transmitting its 5G network from a drone.

The AT&T drone team picked this remote location for the launch of its Flying COW (Cell on Wings), because of that: It’s remote. No trees. No houses. No humans. Only wide-open spaces and the occasional four-legged cow.

While we’ve read a lot lately about AT&T and Verizon’s launch of 5G and its potential impacts to aviation, this is a completely different way to bring 5G to areas where users often have no signal on their cell phones.

“We had intermittent, weak LTE signal at the flight location before we launched the 5G Flying COW,” said Ethan Hunt, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Principal Program Manager. “We flew the drone up to about 300 feet, turned on the signal and it began transmitting strong 5G coverage to approximately 10 square miles.”

That means customers with a capable 5G phone in the area could have gone from no service to super-fast wireless connections in seconds, according to AT&T officials.

“Drones may use 5G for command and control or to stream video, but the AT&T 5G Flying COW is the only drone that provides a 5G network,” Hunt said.

A COW serves as a cell site on a drone, company officials explained, noting AT&T has been using this technology to beam LTE coverage to customers during big events and disasters for years.

The company plans to expand the capabilities of its Flying COW, according to Art Pregler, Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Program Director.

“We’re working to autonomously fly without tethers for months without landing, using solar power to provide secure, reliable, and fast 5G connectivity to large numbers of users over wide geographic areas,” he said. “This solution may one day help bring broadband connectivity to rural and other underserved communities across the U.S. and elsewhere.”

The Flying COW is just one of several drone projects in the works at the company, including Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) flight operations, company officials reported.

The Drone team is testing BVLOS, which allows the pilot to operate a drone from a completely different location.

“We currently have an AT&T-patented flight control system that allows our operators and our tethered Flying COWs to be separated by thousands of miles,” company officials said. “In this sense, we can already operate our tethered Flying COWs BVLOS. We are also working on a next phase to launch untethered Flying COWs from the operator’s location to fly many miles away to provide 5G connectivity at BVLOS locations.”

Company officials are searching for more drone pilots, they add.

Led by a former FAA-trained air traffic controller, former U.S. Air Force air safety officer, and former NASA mission control specialist, the program currently has 30 drone pilots, AT&T officials said.

“In addition to the unmanned training, the pilots have to attend ground school, online training, hands-on day and night field training, ongoing flight simulation training, and ongoing currency training,” they said. “This is a multi-month, multi-tier series of courses which cover 17 different topics ranging from Robotic Aircraft to Professionalism to Safety and Payloads.”