Flying COWs and OSS. A game-changer for Capacity Management?

A recent article here talked about re-imagining the planning and design process for telco networks. We’ve also been heavily involved with the use of drones to help deliver new ways of working in the telco industry lately too. With those two concepts still fresh in our memory, this article about flying COWs from AT&T really struck a chord.

But what is a COW? Clearly not the four-legged variety that graze in pastures around the world. For those of you not already familiar, a COW in telco vernacular is a Cell on Wheels. In other words, a self-contained, moveable cellular node that can stand up mobile network capacity wherever it is deployed. COWs are often deployed to major events where user density spikes for a short period (eg sporting events), in natural disasters where comms infrastructure has been wiped out and in remote locations where cellular service isn’t reliably available to support search and rescue efforts.

The article from AT&T though is not your typical COW. It’s a flying COW, a Cell on Wings (not Wheels).

What a great way to stand up extra cellular capacity at short notice!

The article doesn’t go into details about costs of the COW itself or the ongoing operations, so we could only speculate whether it might become a scalable network capacity consideration in future. However, the article does mention that they’re tethered but Art Pregler of said that AT&T is “working to autonomously fly without tethers for months without landing, using solar power…. This solution may one day help bring broadband connectivity to rural and other underserved communities.”

Naturally, my mind goes to the OSS / BSS implications, factors such as:

• Combining coverage mapping with demographics to identify ideal locations to hover a flying COW
• Managing within local regulatory obligations / constraints for unmanned aircraft and radio spectrum licencing
• Site lease management (if applicable)
• COW design, configuration and backhaul / transmission
• Asset lifecycle management (from design, build, commission, operations, relocations, decommission)
• COW rollout management and handover to operations (including implications such as activating transmission, onboarding for management purposes, orchestration of virtualised workloads and connectivity / slices, address allocation, automated testing, customer connection readiness, charging, etc)
• Self optimisation of the COW’s performance and backhaul via ongoing configuration tweaks
• Additional ongoing observability and management where full automation / optimisation isn’t possible
• Auto-updating inventory and topology views to accommodate the new node when each COW comes online in a new location (including the need for modelling inventory in three-dimensions, not just two)
• Remote flight-path control (if applicable)
• Reporting
• Location management

But thinking further ahead, my mind goes to a more autonomous cellular network, where OSS identify coverage gaps and control squadrons of drones to programmatically leave their hangars and fill in the gaps – performing all the dot-points above (and more) automatically.  🙂

I like what companies like Rakuten are trying to do with their autonomous cellular network ambitions. This potentially does away with some of the physical constraints for those models though, such as having to plan around fixed tower / pole positions. It has the potential to take autonomy to a whole new level (notwithstanding regulatory constraints of course).

What do you think? Is this just pie (or COW) in the sky thinking? Leave us a note in the comment section below.