The “Six Nines” of Availability
To meet the expectations of both customers and aviation authorities for drone delivery and flight beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) DroneUp must get as close as possible to the “six nines” of availability: 99.9999% uptime.
Traditional RF links are too limited in range, and SATCOM (satellite communications) solutions proved to be too expensive. This left cellular as the communications technology of choice. DroneUp looked at a variety of different cellular connectivity products on the market, and found that many were either single-SIM or single-carrier solutions. While the drone delivery use case would not need the bandwidth of more than a single SIM, the ability to utilize multiple SIMs across multiple carriers eliminated the potential problem of having a single point of failure, providing the reliability that was required.
Elsight’s Halo was a great fit. “The carrier-agnostic Halo can utilise up to four SIMs from multiple carriers, and uses AI-powered bonding that aggregates all available bandwidth into one, automatically balances traffic, and allows drone communication systems to seamlessly switch to a backup link if network coverage is lost.”
“Elsight provided the reliability that we needed, provided the connection consistency, provided the bandwidth. Elsight had the cloud, provisioning, management and software capabilities that allowed us to continue refining and improving, something Elsight still does very well,” said DroneUp CTO John Vernon.
