About Sky Drones
Sky Drones Technologies Ltd build connected hardware and software products for drone manufactures and commercial drone service providers including flight control, ground control, and communication systems. Sky Drones focus is to help their customers accelerate and scale up commercial operations through their experience in research and development, manufacturing and delivery of solutions for the future unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) market. With customers located worldwide, Sky-Drones are an internationally orientated company, with a view to further expand into thriving markets.
Challenge
Sky Drones supply their customers with a full end-to-end solution to enable them to monitor, manage and control their drone fleets through 4G LTE connectivity but required their customers to supply their own SIM card. The challenge with customers buying a Mobile Broadband SIM from a network provider meant that the SIM itself had limited capabilities and risk. Drones can fly for miles and by only supplying a single network SIM, there is no guarantee of ‘Always-On’ connectivity. The limitations of having a capped data allowance and no visibility of data usage could lead to drones losing connectivity whilst in the air, causing expensive and dangerous accidents. It could also lead to having no governance of how many drones are in use at any given point if the SIM runs out of data, providing customers with limited or no visibility of their drone fleets.
Sky Drones wanted a solution that used 4G cellular connectivity, linking drones and their data, all accessed from Sky-Drone Cloud.
Solution
Wireless Logic were able to provide an un-steered roaming SIM for ‘Always-On’ 4G connectivity through a resilient and secure connection allowing for the user to have the strongest coverage across all major UK networks, rather than relying on a single fixed network SIM connection. By overlaying the Virtual Private Network (VPN) from Wireless Logic, the data generated from the drones back to Sky-Drone Cloud is always secure. Sky-Drones can now offer their customers a full end-to-end solution using 4G cellular connectivity with fully managed data and SIMs through Wireless Logic’s SIM Management Platform, SIMPro.
Outcome
Sky-Drones customers have a simple and effective solution, all on a subscription basis that is managed fully through Sky-Drones Cloud management platform. Through utilising 4G connectivity and using a multi-network SIM, there are no limitations to where or how drones can be used across different sectors or business types.
Drones are becoming more and more software defined and have to meet the requirements of the permanent broadband connectivity onboard for increased operating range and beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flights. LTE technology is a perfect communication solution for drones allowing real-time situational awareness globally and direct connectivity to the cloud. Sky-Drones build new hardware and software products for drones heavily relying on LTE connectivity, making remote operations and real-time payload data transferring possible. We appreciate our partnership with Wireless Logic for having managed SIM cards solutions and its seamless integration into LTE networks globally.