Telecom company Reliance Jio has conducted successful trials of connected drones on its indigenous 5G network, the telco’s senior vice president Aayush Bhatnagar said.

“At Jio, we have taken another major stride in “Making 5G real” -beyond speed tests and demos. Jio has successfully conducted trials of connected drones on its indigenous 5G network,” Bhatnagar said in a LinkedIn social media post on Monday.

The trials involved a precision command and control of drones over 5G using a fleet management system running in the Cloud to perform tasks such as image recognition, track-and-trace, discrete payload pickup, and delivery, drone route sorties, video imagery, real-time drone control, and other applications, the executive added.

“5G-connected drones will enable future use cases across industries and enterprises,” Bhatnagar said.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) kicking off a consultations process for setting up base price across 10 frequency bands for the commercial launch of 5G services, reported by Economic Times.

Jio’s latest demonstration follows a series of trials that have been conducted previously, such as Voice and Messaging over 5GNR or VoNR using homegrown 5G RAN and Core, an AI multimedia chatbot and immersive high-definition virtual reality (HD VR) meeting.

The telco has said it has developed its own homegrown 5G stack which it plans to export abroad once testing its competence on a pan-India scale.

The second-largest telco Bharti Airtel has ramped up its 5G use case development. It is said to be working with global companies such as Accenture, Amazon Web Service (AWS), Cisco, Ericsson, Google Cloud, Nokia, Tata Consultancy (TCS) to demonstrate enterprise-grade use cases using high-speed, low-latency 5G networks.

The Sunil Mittal-led telco has said it is working with brands such as Apollo Hospitals, Flipkart, and other manufacturing companies to test 5G-based solutions.

Vi recently also demonstrated 5G use cases around public safety, smart&connected health, smart constructions, and connected worker with its equipment partners Ericsson and Nokia, in Pune and Gandhinagar, using the 5G trials airwaves allotted by the government.

In doing so, Vodafone Idea said it showcased 5G-powered applications such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable low latency communications (uRLLC), multi-access edge computing (MEC), virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), among others.

Communications and IT Minister Ashwini Vasihnaw in a recent TV interview said that 5G spectrum sale and network rollouts are expected to take place in the second quarter of 2022.