Dallas-based AT&T spread its propellers and landed a spot in the cloud in one short week.
AT&T flew through AT&T Stadium on last week testing the stadium for conditions when the stadium is packed with fans making calls, sending videos or texting about the game, according to the Dallas Morning News.
The company was testing whether the drones could be become high-flying cell towers to boost the signals of fans inside the stadium.
Following Federal Aviation Administration guidelines approved this past summer by the Obama administration, AT&T has joined a number of companies that are finding ways to save money and time using drones. The drone software used by AT&T simulates the cellphone use of fans and then generates a heat map of cellphone coverage while pinpointing dead zones and low signal areas.
This same process originally took a week and a 30-pound backpack according to the Morning News.
“In the past, we used to walk,” said Paula Doublin, AT&T’s assistant vice president of construction and engineering. “Now, we can fly.”
AT&T employees in all 50 states can request drones for work beginning this week, Art Pregler, AT&T’s national drone program leader, told the Morning News.
This new approach to signal checking came one day before the announcement of Dallas-based AT&T and Amazon Web Services partnership to provide cloud computing solutions to customers, according to a Morning News article. This partnership will allow AT&T’s NetBond customers to utilize “the cloud,” promotes seamless sharing between connected devices such as fitness trackers, and finally it will beef up cloud security by “recognizing and responding to threats quickly.”
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