Drones Reducing Need for People to Climb to Inspect Cell Towers

Today virtually everyone has a cell phone. To keep up with this ubiquitous cell phone adoption, carriers have had to deploy more and more cell towers with ever increasing capabilities to keep up with consumer’s demand for global cell phone coverage with high speed data availability.

Wireless communication is quickly rendering landlines obsolete. As more and more cell towers are erected to support the major carriers – Verizon, ATT, Sprint, T Mobile among others, it is imperative that these cell towers are properly maintained to reliably operate at peak capacity. This requires regular inspections and often times preventative maintenance.

Historically, people were deployed to climb these towers, affixed by rope 50 – 300 feet in the air in order to inspect and determine what repairs need to be made. Today, drones are quickly reducing the need for people to climb to inspect cell towers. Using small, easily maneuverable drones, which are capable of inspecting the cell tower from virtually any angle and elevation, can be a quick, safe, cost effective means to assess the condition of the tower and its communication equipment. High definition images can be captured by drones, uploaded to cloud storage and provide management with timely data to more efficiently make maintenance and repair decisions. Also, data that is stored can be easily compared with prior images to better identify changing equipment conditions over time.

With over 300,000 cell towers in the United States, the potential for keeping more people on the ground will greatly enhance safety while concurrently improving cell tower inspection efficiency.