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Discover cutting-edge solutions from leading global suppliersBT Group has been working across the UK’s emerging drone ecosystem for nearly five years, examining how connectivity, airspace management, flight management and physical infrastructure can support the transition to large-scale operations.
Dave Pankhurst, Innovation Director, Connected Solutions at BT Group.
In this unique Q&A with UST, Dave Pankhurst, Innovation Director, Connected Solutions at BT Group, discusses the company’s work with drone operators, UTM providers, regulators and technology partners, as well as its own use of drones through the Drone 360 platform. He also outlines BT Group’s focus on cellular connectivity for BVLOS operations, including dedicated drone SIMs, quality of service and multipath communications combining cellular and satellite connectivity. With operators seeking reliable communications and regulators requiring confidence in safety and resilience, BT Group is working to address both sides of the emerging commercial drone ecosystem.
Do you have to work with operators and regulators differently, or do they have the same requirements?
It’s about understanding their specific requirements. For some organisations, that can literally be a SIM card in a dongle, allowing them to prove and do what they need to do, while for others, where they’ve got more complex landing sites and other elements involved, the requirements can be very different. If you’re trying to land, for example, in a city centre with significant shielding from buildings or cages around you, then the connectivity solution for that environment will potentially be different.
But underneath it all, there’s a fundamental requirement: we want the drone to be safe, communications to be effective, and the ability to communicate regularly while understanding the latency requirements. Sometimes, it’s also about operators understanding what’s possible and what’s not, because as long as they know that and can mitigate effectively, they’re in a good position. It’s the lack of knowledge that’s often the problem.
What is the connectivity infrastructure needed to support large scale drone operations in the UK? Where are we at the moment, and what do we need to do to improve it?
What we’ve been trying to do as much as possible is use the assets we have today, rather than needing to fund multimillion pound programmes that would drive costs up for the drone industry at a point when they’re trying to work out how to achieve and scale their operations. What we’ve been fortunate with so far is being able to use the quality of the network we’ve already got.
At the moment, given the scale of operations, it’s completely comfortable within our network as it stands today, but the interesting piece will be in five or ten years’ time, when the volume of events potentially happening at altitude means we need to make different types of investment to enable the network.
As the network evolves through 5G and eventually into 6G, one stage at a time, that will probably enable more devices to operate from the same cells anyway, so this can be a balancing act. I think that’s where, for us, part of the conversation, especially with the CAA and, to some extent, the operators, has been around the fact that there’s this huge asset available that can potentially be used more than is currently considered.
I think there is already a lot we can get out of the infrastructure in place today. From there, it is about tailoring that infrastructure to deliver the right experience for different types of drone operations.
On the other side, I think there is an open question about how far we go. When you look at larger programmes of work, whether that’s around drone first responder programmes or eVTOL infrastructure requirements going forward, where we have a shared footprint or a footprint across the UK of lots of sites, are there opportunities, and is there a logic to housing some of those functionalities where we’ve already got power, space and communications?
I think we’re at an early stage of those conversations, but infrastructure can’t be underestimated when these organisations start looking at scaling across the UK.
What is BT Group developing specifically to support the emerging commercial drone ecosystem?
We’re working with drone manufacturers and different types of manufacturers to make sure they’re ready for this market as well, building up those relationships at a time when there are only a relatively small number of telcos internationally working with OEMs in this space.
We’re also looking at the flight management ecosystem, where there are a number of smaller businesses operating, and asking what assets we can potentially provide them from our network in terms of knowledge of coverage and other information, so they can support commercial drone operations themselves. Some of this will be services that we, as BT Group, can take directly to market, while others might involve asking whether we’ve got data that’s useful in this ecosystem that we can provide to organisations that are then working directly with commercial drone operators.
In more complex scenarios, some commercial and public sector organisations are working with the CAA to understand the situational awareness requirements at take-off and landing points. For a number of these organisations, we have provided drone detection capability through our partner DroneShield, giving them local RF awareness to help determine whether other drone flights are operating nearby.
We’re seeing that evolve in terms of how rich the data and knowledge needs to be to enable them to gather the evidence required to start flying. It’s a massively exciting space, with the number of use cases and different things happening in that area, and those are the underlying pieces we’re doing to support the ecosystem.
BT Group’s role is changing significantly, from traditional telecommunications towards infrastructure for drones and autonomous aviation. Why the shift? Was there a point when you realised BT Group’s could support this industry?
There’s a broader shift happening within the industry. Whether you started five or ten years ago, there’s been a move towards utilising things more intelligently to enable the outcomes organisations want to achieve, and those technologies, whether they be drones, drone platforms, ground robotics or vehicles, all have quite unique requirements and challenges, whether that’s from a regulatory or spectrum point of view, or simply because of the different stakeholders involved.
There’s a risk that the market can develop without you being able to support it as it grows and scales, potentially meaning it doesn’t develop as quickly as it could, or our relevance in that space isn’t as big and as broad as it could be.
Take the police as an example, where they’re involved in the drone first responder programme. There are loads of trials going on at the moment that we’re supporting, and that’s an ecosystem where, by collaborating with them and getting involved at this relatively early stage, we’re helping to accelerate what they’re trying to achieve while also developing our understanding of what the technology and connectivity requirements will look like as those operations scale.
Talking about the different organisations you’ve worked with, including the police, are there previous examples or upcoming projects you can talk about?
We worked with drone operators, UTM style organisations, cyber companies and different organisations around the evolving technology ecosystem, which helped us really develop and learn, but that was very much on the research side of the ecosystem.
Outside of that, we’ve published a few pieces and talked about working with uAvionix, looking at longer range drone flights, where we’re doing the multipath piece around satellite communications and cellular.
There are a lot of things that are quite close now to actually moving out of trial phases or into more expanded trials that we’ve been doing quite a lot of, whether that’s around the underlying connectivity, drone detection or supporting the flight.
