Deutsche Telekom flew mobile base stations on drones over a protected landscape in Czechia this month and kept a working cell network alive across 7.7 square miles (20 square kilometers) with no tower in sight. The trial, run with Czech manufacturer Primoco UAV and T-Mobile Czech Republic, delivered data rates up to 100 Mb/s to standard phones on standard frequencies. DroneXL has covered drones as network tools before, and this test moves the idea from concept to field result.
Two Drones Kept The Coverage Zone Alive
The trial put fully integrated base stations in the air over the Brdy Protected Landscape Area near Nepomuk, and the coverage never blinked. Two Primoco aircraft alternated flight paths, so one flew the network while the other refueled on the ground.
Ladislav Semetkovský, Primoco UAV’s CEO, described the relay plainly: when one aircraft is down for refueling, the second stays up, keeping connectivity uninterrupted. That detail matters more than it sounds. A single drone gives you a demo. A rotating pair gives you a service.
The backhaul ran over satellite, which means the airborne cell needed no ground station and no cable anywhere in the coverage zone. Phones connected on standard terrestrial frequency bands, so the network worked with the devices people already carry. Jaroslav Holiš, Senior Manager of Research and Trials at Deutsche Telekom, framed the goal in one line: innovation happens when new technologies prove themselves under real-world conditions.
The Graveyard Of Airborne Internet Is Crowded
Every big tech company has tried to hang the internet in the sky, and most of those aircraft are museum pieces now. Facebook flew Aquila, a solar-powered fixed-wing drone meant to beam connectivity across a 31 mile (50 km) radius. The program hit real technical marks, including a 36 Gbps link demonstrated over 8 miles (13 km) in 2017, and was still canceled in 2018.
Alphabet buried two of its own attempts. The Titan drone internet project wound down in 2017, and Loon, the stratospheric balloon network, followed in 2021 after nine years without a sustainable business model.
The survivor is Taara, Alphabet’s light-beam project, which pushes up to 20 Gbps over distances of 12.4 miles (20 km) using narrow invisible beams, and already links Nairobi streets and the banks of the Congo River. Deutsche Telekom’s trial sits at the opposite end of the ambition scale, and that is exactly why it might work. Nobody in Czechia promised to connect the planet. They promised a working cell over one valley, and delivered it.
Disaster Response Is Where Airborne Cells Already Earn Their Keep
The use case Deutsche Telekom names first is the one with a track record: emergencies and crisis zones that need communication around the clock. The precedent is American. AT&T flew its Flying COW, a drone carrying LTE radios, over Puerto Rico in 2017 after Hurricane Maria wrecked the island’s towers, with FAA approval and coverage claims of up to 40 square miles (104 square kilometers) from about 200 feet (61 m) up.
AT&T was not alone. Verizon built its own drone fleet for restoring cell service after disasters, and both carriers now treat airborne cells as standard storm-response equipment rather than experiments.
Europe has been circling the same idea from the rescue side. DroneXL covered 5G drones aimed at mountain rescue back in 2024, where the missing link was always reliable coverage in terrain no operator will ever serve with towers.
There is a quiet symmetry in the timing. Just over a week ago, DroneXL reported on AT&T and Ericsson turning ordinary 5G towers into a drone radar during the World Cup. The same industry now runs the trick in both directions: towers that watch drones, and drones that become towers.
DroneXL’s Take
Let’s be straight, the drone industry spends most of its press cycle on two stories, drones that save people and drones that hurt people. The third story gets no headlines and might age better than both: drones as infrastructure you can launch instead of build.
Fiber needs trenches, permits, and right-of-way negotiations that can die in an office and take years when they survive. A tower needs land, steel, and a community that accepts it. An airborne cell needs one thing: flight permission over the area. For a village cut off by a landslide, a valley that never justified the trenching cost, or a disaster zone where the towers are on the ground in pieces, that difference is the whole game.
The graveyard behind this idea is full of moonshots that tried to replace the internet’s backbone. Deutsche Telekom is attempting something smaller and more honest: a temporary cell, on demand, over the places the network forgot or lost. The Facebook and Alphabet failures were failures of business model, not of physics, and a telecom running drones to patch its own network has a business model built in.
The companies say further development with partners comes next. Whether these trials end in a deployable emergency service, and how fast, is an open question the Czech test cannot answer yet. What it answered is the question that killed Aquila: can ordinary phones hold a usable connection from an aircraft, using boring frequencies, for as long as the aircraft can stay up? Over one Czech valley, for the length of a trial, they can. Connecting the isolated communities this technology keeps promising starts with exactly that kind of small, verified yes.
Sources: SDxCentral, Verdict, Data Center Dynamics, Engadget, NPR
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Rafael Suárez.
