AT&T to use drones to improve cell services

AT&T has a solution to the problem of crumbling cell services in the face of massive simultaneous demand from hundreds or thousands of people from one location, such as at events.

The telco floated the idea of building cell extensions into drones and flying them in to handle high demand, in a blog post by chief strategy officer, John Donovan, on Wednesday.

AT&T envisages using the drones for "large events or even rapid disaster response," the latter of which was really the more important application, since cell towers often got overloaded as people started calling for assistance or trying to get in touch with their families. AT&T has decided to name the drones "Flying COWs," standing for "cell on wings."

Service providers deploy boosters during some large events and disasters, however, the advantage here is drones could potentially be deployed quickly and reach areas that a truck toting cell equipment behind it could not.

AT&T is already using drones for a related application. Earlier this year, it announced plans to begin inspecting cell towers using drones, which allowed damage assessment without sending a human up. It was supposed to be a safer and all around quicker method for inspections, although humans were still necessary for the preparations.

AT&T, this week, also launched its national drone programme. AT&T will use drones to perform aerial inspections of cell towers, allowing the carrier to collect data and make real time changes to the networks.

According to commentators, while this seemed exciting, there was still a long way to go before users stopped getting upload error messages from Facebook and Instagram at big events.