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AT&T Thinks Drones Can Fix Terrible Reception At Baseball Games, Music Concerts (marketwatch.com)
Cell services are at some of their worst behaviors at music concerts, baseball games and other similar large public gatherings. AT&T thinks it might have a solution for it. In a blog post today, the carrier company announced the idea of building cell extensions into drones and flying them in to handle the large dense traffic demands. From a report:AT&T has dubbed the drones "Flying COWs" -- the COW stands for âoeCell on Wings.â The drones would boost LTE coverage to areas in need of it during occasional large events. They would be tethered to the ground to prevent them from going rogue and flying away. The trial project is part of AT&T's just-launched national drone program, which will focus on how AT&T and its customers can benefit from drones. The program director, Art Pregler, said they wouldn't have to fly too high, perhaps just under the roofline of stadiums or buildings. AT&T also envisions that Flying COWs could provide boosted coverage in disaster response situations, particularly when vehicles aren't otherwise able to drive into the affected areas.
Flying Stingrays!
...They would be tethered to the ground to prevent them from going rogue and flying away....
And they could be tethered to a sky hook to prevent them from going rogue and falling out of the sky onto people.
Aren't we at the point where enough is enough?
To the /. powers that be, could you please update your systems so submitters can copy and paste with a reasonable expectation that characters like double quotes (") don't get mangled? At the very least, downgrade your editor system so these issues can be seen before the item is released?
Isn't this supposed to be the premier site for âoepropellerheadsâ? I think that it is long past when annoyance this should have been fixed.
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Why not put them on poles? Doesn't that make it all a lot simpler?
Ok Cowguy, here's your chance. Tell us what drones say, or what we say, or whatever. This is it, your big chance!
I can't hear you over the sound of the drone hovering over my head!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Yes, just what everyone wants, more people shoving more phones up to take pictures of an event they're not even looking at.
What we really need is for everyone to get used to drones flying around crowded stadiums.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What if when you go to a music concert, baseball game, or any other large gathering, you watch what you paid for instead of staring at your stupid facebook app all evening? Then there will be plenty of bandwidth available at that location. Problem solved.
Or if you really can't just stop staring at the screen. Go home! You're ruining it for everyone else.
Why does it have to be 'drones?' If they are tethered to the ground anyway, why wouldn't balloons be an easier and cheaper solution than a hovering quadcopter?
Hmmm, how to handle large crowds at large, permanent venues? Drones?! Why not just install more permanent hardware?
It makes sense for emergencies where you have a temporary need though.
Okay, "why not use a balloon" aside:
"Flying Cell-On-Wings" - doesn't the "Wings" part cover that? Unless you're gonna go the whole mile and dress these things up like cows and pronounce it "Flying Cow" (instead of see-oh-double-you).
you still have tens of thousands of people broadcasting on the same frequencies and phones still have to filter all that traffic out. how does more towers or drones solve this issue?
How about all the cell phone service providers increase the number of towers so you can get a reliable signal in buildings and not have to go outside to make a call. That'd make a lot of customers far happier in the long run than the inconvenience of not being able to use your cell phone at an event where you're most likely not wanting to be bothered with a call at all and are likely to be asked to keep your cell phones OFF.
Perhaps drones could create micro cells with short range and use a different frequency to comm back to the main tower. However, it would seem cheaper and more prudent just to put a small AP like antenna mounted under certain seats or to other structures in the venue. Even then that does not fix backhaul issues. If your DS3 is full you are just not getting more through it, and in the carrier's defense, it does not seem financially sound to add more backhaul to a place that only sporadically sees high traffic demands.
Silence is a state of mime.
Sold save some electricity by giving them a place to land, then. Like, say, a little tower? The drones could just pop out of little alcoves and sit in top of the towers. Or heck! Why bother with the alcoves! They can just sit there the whole time! Maybe even weld them right into the towers so they don't fall off.
I'm not sure what you'd call these towers with little cell radios on them, though. They don't fly anymore... Just COWs I guess? Oh, I know; you're saving alot of money, so you can call towers with cell phone drones attached to them Cash COWs!
I'm a genius.
How about mounting them on the Goodyear blimp?
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Poles are lower tech than balloons, and you don't have to worry about wind.
Why not an inflatable pig cell hub? At a concert. It might be just the incentive needed to get Pink Floyd back together again.
Or, since they want to put them "just under the roof line", just stick access points to the roof?
( But, naw, that't not hip enough. )
In retrospect I'm surprised at how well my phone worked when at an Orioles game this past Sunday. No problem sending photos from the game and looking up player info. Usually in such crazy crowded conditions my phone becomes useless.
I guess AT&T has seriously beefed up network capacity at Orioles Park.
Somebody wants to save money on equipment. Rather than put a permanent installation on a stadium that's not in use all the time, they want to move extra bandwidth over the highways during rush hour, then "downtown" during the day (or over whichever shopping center / industrial park pays for it). It would be cheaper to use cherry-picker trucks, drive them on station and put up the antennas, but yes, not hip enough, and requires paying a driver while the truck is standing there waiting to be vandalized. The ability to cover a spontaneous location, like a concert or a moving demonstration, would be a bonus.
Drones hovering over peoples head in an area where balls are batted at high velocity. What could possibly go wrong.
For the youngsters: a 1977 movie (based on a book) about hijacking and booby-trapping the blimp covering the Super Bowl so that it will blow up over the stadium.
Here's my solution:
If you go to an athletic event or music concert, how about you go to an atheletic event or music concert to watch the bloody gods-be-damned athletic event or music concert, and not fuck around on your gods-be-damned phone the entire time! Or is that just too triggering for you people addicted to your gods-be-damned phones?
Stop walking through your lives with your eyes glued to your stupid phones and actually live your life!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
ding ding ding, you get a COWdrone
If you're going to tether the drone anyway, wouldn't it be cheaper to stick it on a wooden pole and hire somebody from the Home Depot parking lot to hold it up for three hours? I mean, I'm being slightly sarcastic here, but this use of drones might be the most bizarre idea I've heard in a long time. I can't imagine they'd be able to keep the weight below the legal safety limits for drones flying over populated areas....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Little birdie flying high,
dropped a message from the sky.
As I wiped it from my eye,
I thanked the lord that cows don't fly!
...when cows fly.
There is a Universal Life Value Check it
Roving Radiofrequency Interference source; We need to get a FCC rule limiting such mobile Cell stations to 1.5 Watts PEP transmitter power......
... Probably right after the first drone-carried bomb, false-flagged as a communication company's bandwidth-booster, goes off over, or in, a stadium crowd.
Although why terrorists keep using bombs has always puzzled me, since an aerosol of a nerve agent or disease spores would do far more damage - and the latter might not even be noticed until long after the event.
Or start with firebombs at the exits. Mass murders with "fire in a crowded venue" have historically had FAR higher body counts that "deranged shooter in a gun-free zone" incidents. (Especially when the exits are blocked - usually by venue operators, in violation of fire codes, to avoid people sneaking in without paying.) Muslims might not go for this, though, since they do have a prohibition on using fire in war (though some of them seem to keep finding exceptions to that rule). But they're far from the entire population of terrorists.
It's also puzzled me why they always seem to go after crowds of ordinary people, rather than the ruling class. Cultural issues, maybe? Easier targets? An ideology that says every voter is responsible for a republic's bad deeds?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Now drones delivering beer, that's "Stuff That Matters"(tm)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
... you'd think the attendees would, you know, actually pay attention to the event. Silly me.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
That solves the battery problem. With a power feed in the tether the flight time should be virtually unlimited.
The last terrorist attempt using nerve gas I know of was that one in Japan, that killed 12 people in a jam-packed subway system. The terrorists had high-tech assistance (or they wouldn't have had the nerve gas) and failed to do anything serious about making sure it got dispersed. Dispersal is, I believe, tricky. Bombs are easier to get, lower tech, and are fairly easy to get right.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I was under the impression that these baseball/concert stadiums are relatively permanent structures. Why can't they just mount a few of these on the overhang above the fans/field? Seems simpler, cheaper, and easier to implement. If the cost of the communications equipment is prohibitive, they could just have a few mounts in each stadium and move the equipment around as needed.
Let,s see. The cell tower is expensive, so it's not worth building more for the occasional event. The drone costs $2K, so it's cheaper. I get that. And we don't want it to fly away, so we'll tie it to the ground. So much for ease, convenience, and on-the-fly deployment. And, of course, we get the buzzing sound over music concerts, that'll go over great.
Here's a better idea. Build the drone for $2K, tie a helium baloon to it, and tie the baloon to the venue.
Here's a simpler idea. Build the drone for $2K, and just glue it to the ceiling. The 10 million dollar stadium can have a $2K cell booster as the budget overage.
I have never had issues using my phone at Orioles games, but it may be due to the lack of people in the stands.
But yeah, Camden Yards probably has some pretty beefy wireless infrastructure, it may be because of M&T stadium and Camden Yards so close together. My Verizon phone has never had issues at the game.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?