ZTE, China Telecom validate drone-based emergency communication solution

ZTE Corporation, an international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the Mobile Internet, has announced that in cooperation with the Quanzhou branch of China Telecom it has successfully verified its emergency communication solution based on drone technology.

The solution, which utilises the industrial multi-rotor drone equipped with a ZTE Pico base station and customer premises equipment (CPE), weighs only 15 Kg so it can be easily carried and quickly transported to a rescue scene.

The field test demonstrated that the drone could complete preparation and then be flown within 10 minutes. Within a 5km controlling distance, the downlink peak data rate achieves 30Mbps and the average voice over long-term evolution (VoLTE) speech quality mean opinion score (MOS) reaches 3.3, guaranteeing a good user experience.

Nowadays, people demand constant access to information with the ability to share information and contact others anytime anywhere through smart phones. However, when natural disasters and terror attacks occur, mobile stations are often destroyed, which interrupts mobile services and causes great difficulty for rescue efforts.

Fujian Province, located on the southeast coastline of China, is one of the most affected provinces for typhoon disasters. Normally, it takes 10 to 48 hours to recover mobile base stations or deploy emergency base stations. Often, emergency communication vehicles fail to enter the destroyed areas in a timely fashion due to traffic restrictions put in place following typhoon warnings. This is why a more flexible emergency communication solution is needed.

The ZTE drone-based emergency communication solution adopts 4G macro cell signals for backhaul, has low cost and can be conveniently deployed.

China Telecom Quanzhou Branch will maintain close future cooperation with ZTE, exploring drone solutions for long flight times and expanding drone-based applications for emergency communication solutions.