T-Mobile Austria demonstrates Europe's first 5G drone in Innsbruck

T-Mobile Austria demonstrated the first 5G live operation in Innsbruck on the flight of a drone, transmitted over the 5G network. With the first 5G drone flight in Europe, the operator and technology partner Huawei demonstrated that the next generation of mobile networks is capable of controlling a drone with a real-time navigation and simultaneously transmitting a HD camera records from the drone. The infrastructure provider IKB offers fibre-optics network with the total length of 640 kilometres to support T-Mobile as a regional partner.

Innsbruck was selected as the pilot are for testing of LTE network back in 2009. Today, the operator demonstrated 5G technology under real-time, not laboratory, conditions. 

The technology has a potential to transmit data at a speed of 10 Gbps, practically in real time. During the demonstration in Innsbruck, the speed of 2 Gbps and latency of 3 milliseconds were reached. The latency for all users reaches the order of one millisecond, which is the reaction time of nerve cells.