19 May 12:58
At the CIPR 2026 (“Digital Industry of Industrial Russia”) forum, which opened on May 18 in Nizhny Novgorod, MTS presented an airmobile complex that will provide communications in hard-to-reach areas.
MTS demonstrated an airmobile communications complex (AMCS) using a tethered aircraft – a hexacopter, a Russian-made LTE/5G base station “IRTEYA” and an all-wheel drive light van “GAZ Sobol NN 4i4”.
Such complexes are designed for the deployment of LTE/5G mobile communications where there is none: in sparsely populated and remote places for various needs – mass events, agricultural work, environmental monitoring, emergency response, search and rescue operations. The solution can also be used to organize dedicated Private LTE/5G technology networks in industries with production sites in hard-to-reach areas.
The communication complex can be brought into working order in 30 minutes by two specialists in almost any place where a four-wheel drive vehicle can travel. The hexacopter, held by a cable, carries a radio module with an antenna and is capable of providing reliable radio coverage within a radius of 10-15 km from a height of 100-200 meters for three days, regardless of the complexity of the terrain.
The van contains an operator who controls the aircraft and communication equipment, a base station control unit that is connected to the radio module by an optical cable, as well as a gasoline generator that powers the radio module, hexacopter traction motors and other equipment. The airmobile complex is connected to the operator’s core network via a satellite channel or an optical communication line.
The airborne communications complex presented at CIPR 2026 is equipped with a serial 4G/5G base station developed and manufactured by the Russian telecommunications vendor IRTEA LLC. During tests, the equipment installed on the hexacopter provided data transfer rates of up to 1.2 Gbit/s in the 5G standard.
“MTS has begun testing various aircraft as high-altitude telecom platforms. In March, in the Saratov region, we already launched a balloon with a base station, and today we are presenting an airmobile communications complex to the forum participants. It is a ready-to-use solution for quickly deploying connectivity to virtually any location where there is no connectivity. By the beginning of 2028, we plan to create several dozen such complexes and send them to regions where businesses and authorities need to establish communications in remote areas. For this purpose, MTS will create groups in its regional branches for the rapid deployment of mobile communications,” commented MTS General Director Inessa Galaktionova.
In March, MTS announced the start of work on projects to provide telecom services from various types of unmanned aerial vehicles and was the first among Russian telecom operators to carry out a test launch of an aerostat with an LTE base station installed on it in the city of Volsk, Saratov region.
