“This partnership will build on SPL’s world-first 5G demonstration from the stratosphere in 2022,” said SPL CEO Richard Deakin.
Funded by Innovate UK, the trials will be at BT’s labs at Adastral Park and “could offer transformational opportunities for sectors operating in remote areas such as transport, maritime security and search and rescue”, said BT.
Stratospheric Platform’s (SPL’s) antennas are designed to communicate directly with standard 3G, LTE/4G, 5G phones.
SPL prototype
The eventual aim is to create a 20kW >3m diameter version for flight, with 500 individually steerable beams, each intended to be equivalent to a cell created by traditional terrestrial masts – delivering up to 150Mbit/s, and covering a 140km diameter, or 15,000km2 land area.
“Virtually any shape of beam coverage can be painted on the ground,” according to SPL. “Beam coverage can be formed to match specific shapes: motorways, for example, or canals or shipping lanes.”
Step one of the project is demonstrating secure 5G communication with the antenna on a high building connecting through BT’s Open RAN test bed, concurrently supporting multiple user groups and different potential use cases.
SPL was founded in Cambridge in 2014, and is backed by Deutsche Telekom. It aim is to develop hydrogen-powered stratospheric aircraft to provide mobile phone coverage direct to users not covered by ground infrastructure.
