Altaeros Readies SuperTower Aerostat for Rural Use

By Don Bishop, Exec. Editor, Assoc. Publisher, AGL Magazine

May 24, 2019

An aerostat that serves as an autonomous aerial cell tower offers hope for expanding cellular coverage to rural and hard-to-reach areas. The company that makes it, Altaeros, calls its product a SuperTower that lifts radios and antennas more than 800 feet into the air, allowing them to cover the same area that as many as 15 cell towers would.

Joe Ryan, vice president of business and development and general counsel of Alteros, spoke during the Connectivity Expo session, “Sustainable Networks: Opportunities in Disaster Response.” He said the company seeks to lease the aerostats worldwide.

“We are starting in the United States because there is a need and we want regulations in place from the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission that other countries can use as a model.” Ryan said.

Altaeros is ramping up production, Ryan said. “We hope to lease hundreds to carriers and other potential users over the next five or six years,” he said.

The aerostat was designed for rural markets and places without coverage, Ryan said. He said it has turned out that there is demand for other uses, such as using the aerostat to overbuild in areas where a carrier is roaming or using it as a microwave hub. He said the aerostat will also allow a carrier to overlay an existing network to deploy 5G wireless communications or internet of things operation without having to put new equipment at existing cell sites.

The SuperTowers use an autonomous control system to fly themselves; thus, they do not require a crew and or any human input to run day-to-day operations. Ryan said this allows carriers to expand their networks at a 60 percent cost savings.

Because of the helium the aerostat uses for buoyancy has to be topped off once every 30 days, the aerostat has to come down for more helium for a couple of hours a month during a maintenance window. He said there is also the potential for interruption for weather with wind speeds exceeding that of a hurricane.

“The autonomous control takes weather into account,” Ryan said. “It aggregates data from ground sensors, airborne sensors and outside sources like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The control system makes decisions based upon the data and can bring the aerostat down to the ground, let it ride out a major storm, and then direct it to go back up. It doesn’t sound great to come down in hurricane, but the fact is the terrestrial network is often taken down by such storms. Our onboard intelligence allows us to, essentially, hide from a storm and go back up after when the rest of the network is down.”

For cellular communications service, the aerostat carries antennas for 12 sectors. It has three spherical antennas that cover 360 degrees of azimuth with a large beamwidth that accounts for the aerostat’s motion. Ryan said the system can hand off calls intracell on the aerostat itself, and it has the capacity of about four cell towers.

Ryan said the aerostat is about 100 feet long, and the ground area required for it is about an acre of land. He said the aerostat normally goes up 820 feet during operation. “We find the propagation at that height is good, and the rules make it easier to obtain approval for operation at that height,” he said.

Altaeros is ready to hear from potential customers, Ryan said, including anyone who has equipment that could be deployed on it, such as equipment that otherwise would be placed on a tower — except for broadcasting — and any other complementary technologies. The model initially being tested holds a payload of 440 pounds, will following models to be bigger. Ryan said Altaeros also may plan for a smaller one that is portable.