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Communications AT&T Cellphones Wireless Networking

How AT&T's Tethered Drones Can Become Temporary Cellular Towers (businessinsider.com) 49

Posted by EditorDavid from the flying-high dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader Nkwe shares an article about AT&T's "Flying COW" drones — their Cell (tower) On Wings drone technology that's helped restore cellphone service after Hurricane Ida and other natural disasters.

"The device is a cell site situated on a drone engineered to beam wireless LTE coverage across an area of up to 40 square miles." The weather-resistant drone can withstand extreme conditions, and its thermal imaging can help search and rescue teams find people in buildings, tree cover, and thick smoke... The drone has the potential to hover over 300 feet and is connected by a tether attached to the ground.

When someone texts, calls, or uses data, the signal is sent to the drone and transferred through the tether to a router. The router pushes information through a satellite, into the cloud, and finally into the AT&T network. The tether also provides constant power to the Flying COW via a fiber, giving the drone unlimited flight time.

Its flying capabilities allow it to soar 500% higher than a terrestrial Cell-on-Wheels mast, expanding how far the signal reaches, though more drones can be added to widen the coverage area. The drone is small and versatile, making it easy to set up, deploy, and move during rapidly changing conditions, like firefighters chasing a wildfire.
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How AT&T's Tethered Drones Can Become Temporary Cellular Towers More

How AT&T's Tethered Drones Can Become Temporary Cellular Towers

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  • Flying COWs (Score:3)

    by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Saturday September 04, 2021 @02:51PM (#61763573)

    Thanks, but when are they ever going to make it to the PIGs?! That COW has been flying over the moon for hundreds of years, this isn't new.

    • Itâ(TM)ll happen when pigs fly.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Not sure why you would ever need a flying Pipe Inspection Gauge though since they go inside the pipeline.

    • *Jumping*, not flying. Being stuck on that parabolic path severely limits the useful trajectory characteristics.

      • flying (adj.)

        1a : moving or capable of moving in the air
        1b : moving or made by moving rapidly
        flying feet // a flying leap

        flying (noun)
        1 : travel by air

        • Take that too literally, and you'll decide that walking along the ground is flying.

          Flying involves actively propelling yourself through the air. If all your propulsion occurs on the ground then you're jumping (or have fallen or been thrown). And if you have only passive aerodynamic control while in the air, like a paper airplane or "flying" squirrel, then you're gliding. There's a reason we have separate words for the concepts.

          Kites fly because their string is actively propelling them through the air, cu

          • Words, they're what's for dinner.

            Fuck an A, no, you don't get to write a new dictionary and have everybody else use it.

            You only use the word flying for certain situations that more fly-y to you. Everybody else uses what I quoted; and that is where the dictionary found the meaning. In how people use the word.

            Wow, you're stupid.

            • Fine, use your definition. The cow *still* isn't flying over the moon, because there's no air for it to fly through. Though it *was* flying when running on the ground.

              • It's not my definition.

                You thought I wrote that?!?

                Wow, this is slashdot, we expect people to know what a dictionary is here.

                News for Nerds

                Nerds can read.

                • No, but you chose that definition, out of the thousands of subtly and not-so-subtly different definitions available from thousands of different dictionaries.

                  Maybe you chose by default, with Google offering up MW as the first result. They're pretty popular, but no more a definitive authority on the language than any other. And if you're getting a short plain-English definition, you have to assume it comes with all the imprecision and lack of detail that implies.Talk to a pilot or aeronautics engineer and t

                  • No, but you chose that definition, out of the thousands of subtly and not-so-subtly different definitions available from thousands of different dictionaries.

                    *ROFLCOPTER!*

  • Why not a balloon instead of a (powered) drone?

    • Winds. Article mentions this thing can fly in 50mph winds and stay in one place.

      • Winds. Article mentions this thing can fly in 50mph winds and stay in one place.

        Thanks, I missed that.

      • That was my first thought as well... but if it's a tethered drone, staying in place against even much higher winds doesn't need to consume any power. Kites do it all the time.

        A lighter-than-air droneship with just kite-grade control surfaces to maintain altitude and position in a wind would seem to be ideal, consuming virtually no power to remain aloft indefinitely. And when you're done, you just reel it in when the wind is low.

    • Why not a balloon instead of a (powered) drone?

      Even google gave up on balloons years ago:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • I know Google tried it, but lets see the math. Assumptions: Each drone can cover 40 square miles, and there are 40 million square miles of land on earth. So we need 1 million balloons to cover all land mass, including deserts and Antarctica. If they did it with balloons that are solar powered and can do balloon-to-balloon laser links it seems like a feasible idea. At $1000 manufacturing cost each you could make enough to cover the whole of earths landmass with a mere 1 billion investment. It could not cove

      • This isn't for worldwide coverage, this is for areas that have problems with the towers due to a recent event.

        • The average Slashdotter fails to see that for high speed data, you want the opposite of this. You want many lower powered cells spread throughout a community. This 200 ft high emergency cell might really suck for data speed because there might be hundreds of thousands of devices trying to talk to it. But in a situation like this, the hope is that a large percentage of those users are only using it to call 911. When there is no alternative to reaching 911 when all other towers are down, this thing can litera

    • Honestly, for short term shit tethered balloons could still be workable. Use G-Line and put all the active components in the COW van, and all you’ve got aloft is a passive radiator, a funnel, and a steel tether. The balloons are cheap enough to be throwaway, and if you want, you have the mass budget to include scuttling charges aboard each one, say a firecracker to pop open the balloon and ignite the hydrogen filling.

      It’s not like we’ve never done low-mass signal transmission lines before

      • Man, people forgot what G-line is, I bet.

        https://rfcafe.com/references/radio-news/g-line-community-tv-system-november–1956-radio-television-news.htm

    • Seems to me that extreme high altitude balloons might do the job. Get *way* up there, above the wind, maybe 20-30 miles or so, where the sky is black and the weather virtually nonexistent. I think the Airship to Orbit people have actually done a lot of experimenting with controlled balloon flight at such altitudes, and if you can manage solar-powered station-keeping high enough that would do the trick. Probably still some prevailing winds to deal with, but at such low densities that a long narrow balloon

  • 300 feet of cable weighs a lot

    • Yeah, but you save weight on the drone since that cable supplies the power. I'm guessing they have a backup battery on board so they can land it if the cable failed, or loses power, but that only takes a battery that can provide a minute or two of power, and does not need to power the payload.

      • that cable supplies the power.

        No one ever talked about using batteries, but now that you bring it up, you gotta lift up a 300 foot extension cord along with the cat 5, POE doesn't have the juice

        • Use a carbon fiber reinforced [compositesworld.com] power wire/tether, high-ish voltage, and a buck converter.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by piojo ( 995934 )

            Carbon fiber is used primarily avoid stretching. And it saves weight compared to using steel for reinforcement. It has no place in replacing a simple extension cord. However I agree about using high voltage and low current.

        • Use high voltage and a lightweight metal for power transmission so the line can be minimal in size. Use fiber optic (much lighter than CAT5/CAT6) for data. The high voltage lines can double as the hard tether line since there's two of them you have redundancy already in the cable and they likely have enough tensile strength to hold onto the drone.

    • >300 feet of cable weighs a lot

      Not really. Enthusiasts fly kites 300 feet up all the time (the record is apparently 16,009 ft), and if you're using something like dyneema or other high-quality carbon-fiber for the cable, the strength-to-weight ratio is pretty insane.

      A tethered drone is likely in a similar situation, except that it has to power itself when wind speed is insufficient to provide the necessary aerodynamic lift.

      If you want to pass power of signal through the cable that's going to add

  • Fiber (Score:3)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Saturday September 04, 2021 @03:41PM (#61763691)

    >"The tether also provides constant power to the Flying COW via a fiber, giving the drone unlimited flight time."

    Um, no. It might provide fiber for data, but you are not going to transfer flight power through fiber optics. You can bet that is copper. The most power I have seen pushed over fiber is about 1 watt (and that apparently requires 3 dedicated fibers).

    • Standard power gauge wire can't be sent up next to the data cable?

      • You would use some kind of hot-shit high-temp, high-dielectric insulation that will let you have high voltage without a lot of weight, and smaller power wires. And you'd probably put one of your wires on each side of the fiber so the heat would be distributed as evenly as possible. The weight of the buck converter will be less than the weight of the wire, and you don't care much about loss.

      • Why do you even need a data cable? You already have a radio on board. Radio the data back down. Basically make it a power tethered satellite.

    • But why the tether in the first place? Even 22 gauge wire would be an extra ~4 pounds to be lifting. I get that you want long endurance, but having three drones rotating operations from a single base seems much more logical, flexible, and redundant. A 3-500’ wireless uplink is trivial as well.

  • I have newfound respect for AT&T - the article shows that they have gone through multiple versions of drone in search of an optimal solution.

    BUT what if AT&T is not your carrier?

    Do they go around selling AT&T SIMs
    throughout that 40 square miles?

    • This seems like it's part of its FirstNet project. The idea is to get connectivity back to first responders, then being the first network to return service to its mainstream customers.

    • Since this is for emergencies, I thought 911 works with any available carrier .. but I could be wrong.

      • If your phone is compatible with the network technology. Like, your analog bagphone from like 1994 ain't gonna make a 911 call unless you find somewhere where there's an AMPS signal, which seems unlikely since as far as I know there hasn't been an AMPS network anywhere since 2010.

        That said, it wouldn't surprise me if they broadcast a bit of LTE band 2 or something in a way that only accepted emergency calls

    • You don't need an ATT SIM to roam. They could simply allow other carriers phones to roam onto it. Or they could just be like well sux you're not an ATT customer, no service for you!

  • I thought the FBI would use them all hovering over the cars of criminals so that they use that one to order their crimes via cellphone.
    After all, they have non-flying ones.

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