In their effort to reconnect southeastern communities cut off by Hurricane Ida, telecom companies are taking to the skies with flying COWs. Far from heifers, however, those cell-on-wings units are ultra-buffed, extreme weather-resistant drones that provide phone service to isolated people with the outside world.
AT&T COW drones provide phone services interrupted by extreme weather
Telecom giant AT&T says it deployed its most recent generation of COWs to areas of the southeast whose electricity and communications connections have been cut off by Ida. Though tethered to a multi-purpose cable attached to ground equipment, the specialized drone can hover at 300 feet in extreme weather conditions, providing LTE phone coverage over an area of 40 miles. AT&T’s COWs can withstand wind of up to 50 mph, and operate almost indefinitely.
The aerial communication relay stations were developed by AT&T’s Network Disaster Recovery Team, which has already produced several…
