Connecting Rural Scotland using Airmasts and Droneways

This week EE has finally done a press release on what they term as Airmasts (see my blog post here). Back in Nov. last year, Mansoor Hanif, Director of Converged Networks and Innovation BT/EE gave an excellent presentation on connecting rural Scottish Islands using Airmasts and Droneways at the Facebook TIP Summit. Embedded below are the slides and video from that talk.

Driving Connectivity in the Scottish Islands: Droneways and Airmasts from 3G4G

In other related news, AT&T is showing flying COWs (Cell On Wheels) that can transmit LTE signals

Their innovation blog says:

It is designed to beam LTE coverage from the sky to customers on the ground during disasters or big events.
...
Here’s how it works. The drone we tested carries a small cell and antennas. It’s connected to the ground by a thin tether. The tether between the drone and the ground provides a highly secure data connection via fiber and supplies power to the Flying COW, which allows for unlimited flight time.  The Flying COW then uses satellite to transport texts, calls, and data. The Flying COW can operate in extremely remote areas and where wired or wireless infrastructure is not immediately available. Like any drone that we deploy, pilots will monitor and operate the device during use.

Once airborne, the Flying COW provides LTE coverage from the sky to a designated area on the ground.  

Compared to a traditional COW, in certain circumstances, a Flying COW can be easier to deploy due to its small size. We expect it to provide coverage to a larger footprint because it can potentially fly at altitudes over 300 feet— about 500% higher than a traditional COW mast.  

Once operational, the Flying COW could eventually provide coverage to an area up to 40 square miles—about the size of a 100 football fields. We may also deploy multiple Flying COWs to expand the coverage footprint.

Nokia on the other hand has also been showcasing drones and LTE connectivity for public safety at D4G Award event in Dubai

Nokia's Ultra Compact Network provides a standalone LTE network to quickly re-establish connectivity to various mission-critical applications including video-equipped drones. Drones can stream video and other sensor data in real time from the disaster site to a control center, providing inputs such as exact locations where people are stranded and nature of the difficulty of reaching the locations.

Related Posts:

• Flying Small Cells are here...
• Facebook's Attempt to Connect the Unconnected
• An Update from the TIP Summit
• Drone cells are becoming a reality
• When COWs Fly: AT&T Sending LTE Signals from Drones
• Nokia demos drones with LTE connection to conduct rescue operations

What's '5G' in one word for you?

Last month in the IET 'Towards 5G Mobile Technology – Vision to Reality' seminar, Dr. Mike Short threw out a challenge to all speakers to come up with one word to describe 5G technology. The speakers came up with the following 'one words':

• Professor Mischa Dohler, Centre for Telecommunications Research, King's College London, UK - Skills
• Professor Maziar Nekovee, Professor,University of Sussex UK - Transformative or Magic
• Professor Andy Sutton, Principal Network Architect, BT, UK - Opportunity
• Professor Mark Beach, University of Bristol, UK - Networked-Society
• Mark Barrett, CMO, Bluwireless, UK - Gigabit
• Dr Nishanth Sastry, Centre for Telecommunications Research, Kings’ College London, UK - Flexibility or Efficiency
• Dr Reiner Hoppe, Developer Electromagnetic Solutions, Altair - Radio
• Professor Klaus Moessner, 5G Innovation Centre, University of Surrey, UK - Capacity
• Joe Butler, Director of Technology, Ofcom, UK - Ubiquity
• Dr Deeph Chana, Deputy Director, Institute for Security Science and Technology, Imperial College London, UK - Accessibility

What is your one word to describe 5G? Please add in comments. I welcome critical suggestions too :-)

Anyway, for anyone interested, the following story summarises the event:

This section contained story from Storify. Storify was shut down on May 16, 2018 and as a result the story was lost. An archived version of the story can be seen on wayback machine here.

Related links:

• 5G Network Architecture and Design Update - Jan 2017
• Videos from IET TV: Towards 5G Mobile Technology – Vision to Reality

An Introduction to IoT: Connectivity & Case Studies

I did an introductory presentation on IoT yesterday at at the University of Northampton, Internet of Things event. Below if my presentation in full. Can be downloaded from slideshare.

An Introduction to IoT: Connectivity & Case Studies from 3G4G

xoxoxoxoxoxo Added 18/02/2017 oxoxoxoxoxoxox

Below is video of the presentation above and post presentation interview:

5G Network Architecture and Design Update - Jan 2017

Andy Sutton, Principal Network Architect at BT recently talked about the architecture update from the Dec 2016 3GPP meeting. The slides and the video is embedded below.

5G Network Architecture and Design from 3G4G

You can see all the presentations from IET event 'Towards 5G Mobile Technology – Vision to Reality' here.

Eiko Seidel recently also wrote an update from 3GPP 5G Adhoc regarding RAN Internal Functional Split. You can read that report here.

Related posts:

• 5G New Radio (NR), Architecture options and migration from LTE
• 5G Fronthaul: Crosshaul & XHaul
• Some more thoughts on 5G
• Verizon's 5G Standard
• 5G Network Architecture Options - Video