America: Walmart to Ramp Up Drone Delivery By Using Multiple 5G Carriers

The major U.S retail­er, Wal­mart, says it is look­ing to ramp up its drone deliv­ery ser­vice dur­ing 2023 by using mul­ti­ple 5G car­ri­ers, reports dronexl.com, after suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ing more than 6,000 deliv­er­ies last year.

At present, Wal­mart is cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing 36 drone deliv­ery cen­tres through­out sev­en Amer­i­can states. These are: Ari­zona, Arkansas, Flori­da, North Car­oli­na, Texas, Utah and Vir­ginia.

The retail­ing giant has revealed its most pop­u­lar drone-deliv­ered prod­ucts that include lemons, rotis­serie chick­ens, cook­ies and cream ice-cream, Red Bull bev­er­ages and Boun­ty paper tow­els. The company’s drones can car­ry up to 10 lbs in weight and land in cus­tomers’ front or back­yards. Each deliv­ery costs USD3.99.

Mean­while, the retail­er has 4,700 stores across Amer­i­ca avail­able to 90 per­cent of the country’s pop­u­la­tion, and with the deliv­ery drones con­nect­ed to mul­ti­ple 5G car­ri­ers, this will make them safer and more reli­able. Wal­mart offi­cials believe this sys­tem could play a sig­nif­i­cant role in the future suc­cess of the busi­ness.

A spokesper­son com­ment­ed, “While the exist­ing oper­a­tions cur­rent­ly use LTE, our fleet of deliv­ery drones are all 5G capa­ble and as these net­works con­tin­ue to improve, mov­ing over to this new sys­tem is like­ly.”

The present pro­gram is man­aged by Drone­Up, a start­up that Wal­mart first invest­ed in dur­ing 2021. Drone­Up in turn, obtains its wire­less con­nec­tions through a third-par­ty ven­dor, Elsight.

The Elsight web­site com­ments, “In order to achieve the lev­els of safe­ty and reli­a­bil­i­ty required for drone deliv­ery and oth­er BVLOS oper­a­tions, Drone­Up need a solu­tion that gets them as close as pos­si­ble to what is known as ‘Six Nines’ of avail­abil­i­ty or 99.9999 per­cent uptime.”

And goes on, “Tra­di­tion­al RF links are too lim­it­ed in range and SATCOM (satel­lite com­mu­ni­ca­tions) too expen­sive. This left cel­lu­lar as the tech­nol­o­gy of choice.”

Accord­ing to Ben Gross, Elsight Direc­tor of Mar­ket­ing, Drone­Up researched a num­ber of options before decid­ing upon the company’s Halo plat­form. This allows simul­ta­ne­ous 4G and 5G con­nec­tions from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent cel­lu­lar oper­a­tors.

Gross explained, “While the drone deliv­ery use case would not need the band­width of more than a sin­gle SIM, the abil­i­ty to utilise mul­ti­ple SIMS across mul­ti­ple car­ri­ers elim­i­nat­ed the poten­tial prob­lem of hav­ing a sin­gle point of fail­ure, pro­vid­ing the reli­a­bil­i­ty that is required.”

He con­tin­ued, “In fact, the Halo plat­form can utilise up to four SIMS from mul­ti­ple car­ri­ers, and employs AI-pow­ered bond­ing that aggre­gates all avail­able band­width into one, seam­less­ly switch­ing to a back­up link if net­work cov­er­age is lost.”

This means the Wal­mart drone pro­gram is not depen­dent on any one car­ri­er such as Ver­i­zon or T‑Mobile. Instead, the drones are capa­ble of con­nect­ing to the most advan­ta­geous 4G or 5G net­work when­ev­er and wher­ev­er it is required.

Mean­while, Chi­na is already ahead of the game and talk­ing about 6G by 2030, when there are already 110,658 5G base sta­tions alone in the dis­trict of Guang­dong. While 5G great­ly improves drone deliv­ery, 6G will rev­o­lu­tionise it.

By 2021, Chi­na had already deployed 720,000 5G base sta­tions to ensure con­tin­u­ous cov­er­age of key areas con­nect­ed to 85 per­cent of all 5G ter­mi­nals glob­al­ly. In Novem­ber 2020, the coun­try suc­cess­ful­ly launched an exper­i­men­tal test satel­lite for 6G tech­nol­o­gy, along with 12 oth­er satel­lites, using a Long March 6 launch vehi­cle rock­et.

The lure of 6G is enor­mous as it sets to raise the bar even high­er, with speeds esti­mat­ed at 100x faster than 5G and upped band­width to keep con­sumers more con­nect­ed than ever before.

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A report from xinhuanet.com, says, “The next-gen­er­a­tion mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy will inte­grate with advanced com­put­ing, big data, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and blockchain, accord­ing to a white paper issued by the IMT-2030 (6G) Pro­mo­tion Group that was estab­lished in June 2019 under the guid­ance by the Min­istry of Indus­try and Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy.”

It goes on, “The 6G net­work will realise the deep inte­gra­tion of the real phys­i­cal world and the vir­tu­al dig­i­tal one, and build a new world of “intel­li­gent con­nec­tion of every­thing and dig­i­tal twin.”

Accord­ing to this report, the inter­na­tion­al organ­i­sa­tion on tele­com tech­nolo­gies 3GPP “is expect­ed to ini­ti­ate the R&D of the 6G inter­na­tion­al tech­ni­cal stan­dard by around 2025 before the expect­ed com­mer­cial­i­sa­tion around 2030.”

To keep up, Wal­mart and oth­ers must view 5G as a brief skip and a hop towards the real drone deliv­ery game chang­er… 6G.

Read: A major fea­ture about 6G

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/what-is-6g/

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.walmart.com

https://www.droneup.com

https://www.elsight.com

(News Source: dronexl.co)

(Images: Walmart/Elsight)