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U.S. telco working with Intel, holding discussions with aviation regulators to try and drive use cases.
AT&T this week talked up the growing opportunity for enterprises to make use of drones and how the U.S. telco intends to capitalise on it.
"A lot of the initial uptake has been on the consumer side – taking pictures and video – but there are a lot of enterprise uses too," said Mobeen Khan, AVP of IoT solutions at AT&T.
Some of the early use cases centre on inspecting things that are either dangerous or difficult for humans to reach, such as someone’s roof, or power lines or cell towers, for example.
"Our interest is in providing some sort of connectivity and platform to drive drone usage," Khan told Total Telecom.
Drone-based delivery services like the one being tried out by Amazon are also of interest to AT&T, he said.
"We’d love to play a role, from a connectivity perspective, if not more, like telematics and predictive maintenance," he said.
AT&T this week partnered with chip giant Intel to test consumer drones connected to its LTE network. The companies will work together to see how mobile connectivity – which is typically used for providing to coverage to ground-based devices – can be used to transmit flight and telematics data, and streaming video to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
There is also the legal infrastructure to consider, and AT&T is working with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), among others, to ensure that drones are operated safely.
"Regulators so far see the benefit" of drones, Khan said.
"We want to make sure they’re not hazardous – we need certain rules to be followed," he said.
Drones are just one area being addressed by AT&T’s rapidly-expanding IoT business.
The telco ended December with 26 million IoT devices connected to its network. It added 5.2 million in 2015, 1.2 million of which were connected in the fourth quarter.
