China sends a drone (UAV) to provide temporary mobile network in disaster area

m.weibo.cn

19 points·lynzrand··5 comments

Translation:

> Hello villagers from Mihe Town,

> Communication has been cut off by the heavy rain. The emergency management department deployed a Wing Loong UAV above you in response of your emergency need, and it can restore mobile network for China Mobile. Due to limitation on the UAV's flight time, this mobile network can only last for 5 hours. Please report your status to your relatives as soon as possible. Wish you safe!

Guess Google Loon is better suited for this as it can stay longer in place? 5 hours sounds extremely limited given the effort to get there in the first place.

Maybe, but you need to send the balloon to that place and inflate it, then you need to control its altitude so people could get signal on the ground. It doesn't seem to be easy.

An UAV's advantage is that it can fly on its own and fly a long distance (Wing Loong's flight time is said to be 30 hours). Given enough drones they can deploy a continuous mobile network across a large area.

One good alternative I can think of is deploying small self-contained mesh networking devices, something like Project Owl, directly from air. These devices can form an emergency network for communicating urgent needs.

> control its altitude

They're tethered.

Yeah, I think Google Loon would focus on the critical task of serving ads to those affected by a distaster /s

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