DRONES COULD BE THE NEXT BIG WIRELESS DEVICE.
NEED FOR DATA TRANSMISSION EXPECTED TO GROW
• Rogers Communications Inc. is already in millions of homes; now it wants to be on millions of drones.
The telecom giant sees a big potential business opportunity in providing wireless connectivity to unmanned aerial vehicles ( UAVs), allowing them to transmit data instantly to people on the ground in much the same way a smartphone does.
While defence companies such as Lockheed Martin Corp. and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. have been using this technology for a while, it’s very rare in the commercial world.
But as businesses find more and more applications for drones — monitoring everything from crops to pipelines — the need for instantaneous data transmission will grow, said Stefan Galloro, director of partner programs and enablement at Rogers.
“We’re on the cusp of the commercial availability of what we can do in UAVs,” Galloro said in a speech Tuesday to the inaugural International UAV Show in Toronto. “It can minimize risk, it can minimize labour costs.”
Commercially, the technology is still in its infancy, with most drone-collected data being transmitted via Wi-Fi or uploaded once the drone has landed.
“But is that information sensitive, does it need to be secured? Who’s going to host it and who’s going to manage it?” Galloro asked.
This wasn’t much of an issue in the recent past, as most drones could only stay in the air for 30 or 40 minutes at a time. However, improving battery technology is changing that.
“If you can keep your drone up in the air now for hours and hours and hours, law enforcement or stadiums can now put a drone up in the sky and leave it there and do surveillance monitoring and watch that data come in, in real time,” Henry Wilsenack, manager of technical sales for global machine- to- machine and Internet-of-Things partnerships at Rogers, said in an interview.
“The use cases will grow with the ability to keep drones up in the air longer. Now you’re going to want to stream a lot more of that data.”
Wilsenack said agriculture is an industry that could benefit from drone-collected data, and Galloro said the resource industry could also use the technology in remote areas.
The technology is so new that it’s difficult to say how big it can be — when Wilsenack asked his audience how many had used wireless connectivity on a UAV, one hand went up.
However, Galloro pointed to Rogers’ existing base of 1.7 million Internet- of-Things customers as an indication.
Ultimately, though, it will be up to the UAV manufacturers to figure out what their customers need and how to provide it, said Bob Young, chief executive of drone-maker PrecisionHawk Inc.