5 Things to Know About 5G Drones

1. What 5G Actually Changes

5G is the fifth generation mobile network, championed by Qualcomm. It raises the 4G/LTE standard on two axes that matter to aircraft: higher throughput and lower latency. It was also designed for forward compatibility, so its enhanced mobile broadband supports services that did not exist when it launched. Coverage is now broad enough on Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile that planning a mission around it is realistic rather than aspirational.

2. 5G Enables Seamless Communication for Drones

Drones typically fly on point-to-point radio links, which are range-limited and can drop at any moment. On a cellular network a drone gets high reliability and low latency instead, so commands from the ground control station are received and acted on quickly, and the margin for error in flight narrows.

That matters most in GPS-denied and beyond-visual-line-of-sight flight, where the aircraft navigates by visual inertial odometry rather than satellites and the pilot cannot see it. A low-latency link keeps the camera feed updating on the ground station in something close to real time, so the operator knows where the aircraft actually is.

3. It Unlocks Mission-Critical Use Cases

Aerial inspection, film and entertainment, mapping, delivery, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance all benefit from a link that does not degrade with distance. Search and rescue is the clearest case: an aircraft can report data and area imagery back at negligible latency, which directly changes how fast a team can cover ground. See more use cases.

4. The Investment Is Already Made

Uber Eats, Amazon and UPS have all invested in autonomous delivery fleets, and the major carriers have built and tested private 5G networks for drone compatibility. The infrastructure question is largely settled — see our take on why.

5. A 5G Drone Needs a 5G Modem

Like a phone, an aircraft only reaches a 5G network if it carries a 5G-capable modem, a SIM and a data plan with a carrier whose bands it supports. There are two ways to get there:

• Add it to a current platform. The M0090 5G add-on attaches to VOXL 2 over the high-speed board-to-board connector and takes an m.2 Sierra Wireless EM9291, with a nano-SIM slot and USB hubs on the same board.
• Or use 4G/LTE. The M0130 LTE add-on covers the same job where 5G coverage is thin. See connected drones for the comparison.

One practical detail that catches people out: a modem and a SIM are not enough on their own. Carriers hand out private IP addresses behind NAT, so a drone and a ground station on cellular cannot see each other over the internet even when both are connected. The usual fix is a VPN — a server on a cloud instance with a static public IP that both ends join, after which they can exchange MAVLink directly over their VPN addresses. Our guide to connecting a ground control station over 4G/5G walks through it, using Tailscale or a self-hosted OpenVPN server.

5G Takes Flight

Starling 2 Max is our current development drone, powered by the Blue UAS Framework autopilot VOXL 2. It carries the Qualcomm QRB5165, takes the 5G add-on, and keeps the SWaP-optimized form factor that makes onboard processing practical on a small aircraft.

ModalAI also partnered with Qualcomm on the Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G Platform, the first purpose-built 5G drone platform, which condensed autonomous AI and computer vision capability into a compact system for integrators.

For the boards behind all of this, see VOXL.